King's Phase Technologies Limited

King's Phase Technologies is currently focused on sensing ketone bodies which means understanding the human fat burning rate and risk of ketoacidosis. Current technologies in ketone sensing are either invasive or offer ketone sensing with low sensitivity in the concentration range of 1mg ketone bodies per liter air (ppm) and low specificity. Our semiconductor ketone gas sensor provides ketone sensing capability in the range of part per billion range which is over 1000X more sensitive. Imagine a person starts to run on a treadmill hoping to lose fat, while human breath contains 200ppb of ketone bodies at rest when a person starts to burn more fat the breath ketone concentration would increase. Only our sensor could indicate improving fat burning rate. A person seeing an instant positive results is a motivated person.

Our sensor fabrication process utilizes a proprietary technique called flame brush pyrolysis (FBP). The metal precursor is sprayed upon gold interdigitated electrodes via FBP to form a sensor. FBP can produce nanoparticles as small as 15nm. When a population of nanoparticles are sprayed upon a substrate, they form a porous structure which has a high surface area. It allows gas to enter and leave easily making the sensor highly sensitive and responsive. Then the sensor is required to be packaged in a proprietary sensor suspension packaging in order to be used with other devices as a module.

The sensing mechanism utilizes the characteristic of an n-type semiconductor i.e. tungsten oxide to form a layer of adsorbed oxygen ion to react with target gas. When tungsten oxide encounter ketone gas a redox reaction would happen to give an electrical signal.