New Scientist
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Can you share a picture of freshly baked muffins with their aroma? Researchers have developed an AI-assisted device that can detect, transmit and recreate smells over the internet.
Digital scents could let you smell your friends’ baking
Author: Jo Marchant
IMAGINE if, in addition to sharing photos of the muffins you just baked, you could share their aroma, too. That’s the promise of an AI-assisted device that can transmit smells over the internet.
To make their device, Chunyu Yang at the Ohio State University and her colleagues built an “e-nose”, as well as a smell generator, then used machine learning to connect the two. The e-nose consists of arrays of sensors made of metal oxide. When different gaseous components of smells bind to the sensors’ surface, this changes their resistance, creating different electrical signals.
The researchers then trained an AI algorithm to recognise the distinctive signals created by smells from five different foods or beverages: orange, cake, coffee, beer and red wine. Teaching the AI to correctly recognise the smells was the most challenging part, says Yang, because to generate enough data to train the system, she had to expose the sensors to the various smells hundreds of times.
This information was then sent over the internet to a smell-generation device that the researchers are calling “Scentronic”. This part of the system involves miniature containers holding liquids laced with each of the five smells. Above each container is an atomiser that vibrates in response to electric signals, forcing the liquid in the container through a cotton filter and releasing fine droplets into the air, creating the appropriate smell, or combination of smells.
Yang built several designs, including stringing the atomisers onto a necklace and mounting them on a handheld device. When she tested the handheld device on 14 volunteers, they identified the smells being transmitted to them 73 per cent of the time, on average (Science Advances, doi.org/rtzz).
Credits: TCA, LLC.