Do you smell a good idea here?
Can you imagine a smell library that stores data collected with biochemical sensors, optics and machine learning? Can you envision an AI-powered digital nose that uses similar receptors to those in your nose to smell whatever you can smell?
Sounding a bit too futuristic? Aryballe, a France-based startup, doesn’t think so and the company has plenty of potential applications in mind.
Let’s start with robotaxi operators that can’t tell if a passenger smoked in the vehicle or ate a tuna sandwich in the back seat. Before the driverless taxi picks up its next passenger, the digital nose can reroute the vehicle to a maintenance hub and remove any offensive odors before continuing.
Automakers could install the patented technology that mimics the human sense of smell in cars to detect fuel leaks, and rental car agencies would benefit from purchasing vehicles with smell detectors to accurately determine whether or not someone smoked in the car.
It takes about 10 to 20 seconds for Aryballe’s patented technology, which uses organic chemistry and digital sensors among other elements, to create a smell image—about the same time it takes humans to react to odors of some kind. Its smell library, which has replicated anything a human can smell, could also help retrain patients who have lost their sense of smell.
Do you have an application idea for a digital nose?