I have worked in the field of chromatography as an instrumentation engineer for over 10 years, and I'd like to issue a word of warning.
Due to the inadequate software of this product, and the fact that it is used by untrained personnel, there is a very high chance that the results produced for the three gases in the printed report are totally meaningless.
How do I know this? On my second trip to use an OralChroma, I asked the dental assistant if it was possible to see the chromatogram as well as just the numbers that you normally see. The chromaogram is the pictoral trace which comes from the detector. Here is mine:
if the picture worked, you should be able to see four vertical lines. The first one (purple) corresponds to all the gases which do not interact with the column (not of significance and not measured). This is used as a reference point from which to measure the following three marks. (Because the software is not intelligent enough to work out for itself what peaks are there).
However, as you can see, the following three lines do not correspond to actual peaks. They are just being measured at set times from the first peak. These times are clearly wrong and so the line drawn for each of the three gases produces a totally meaningless number (the number corresponds to the height of the line, basically).
Sorry for the detailed post, but i want you all to know that the OralChroma is a very fallible system, and that anybody spending 100s of dollars on these tests should only do so if they agree to print the chromatogram for you. If anyone needs help interpreting their chromatogram I'd be glad to help.
