I mean it's not completely senseless to compare unknown psd to known psd of sick people. It just seems that as a diagnostic metric it doesn't seem to give you m

I mean it's not completely senseless to compare unknown psd to known psd of sick people. It just seems that as a diagnostic metric it doesn't seem to give you much new information and would be too error prone. My thoughts were about fluid dynamics and what causes a particle with a mass greater than air to become airborne in the first place - force of updraft jet on surface area overcomes the force of weight, right? So that'd be determined by the velocity of the air flow and the properties of the fluids interacting. So you'd have to first either measure velocity of the ejection or make an estimate and you'd pick a sensor to measure the different particle sizes. Those sensors typically only give a range of particles as output such as <2.5u, <10u, etc in ppm. You'd be forced to group the distribution into discreet intervals and accept more inherent sensor error. Then you have a non-homogeneous fluid with insoluble solids in it launched at variable velocities each time so you probably would need multiple samples (how many to overcome this variance? Can you do it with out over powering your analysis?). Whether the data was useful would depend on some really good designs that minimize the variance of the samples. It would be an interesting experiment, but I doubt you would find statistically significant results between the different illnesses based on runny noses vs blocked noses viscosity change. I don't think you really need to though because runny or blocked nose is already a diagnostic symptom that doesn't require particle size distribution to determine.