Computer chip will sniff your armpits and tell you when you have BO
The idea is that the chips will be small and cheap enough to be built into clothing, allowing an AI to keep tabs on your BO throughout the day. Arm also wants to add the chips to food packaging to monitor freshness.
The e-noses are part of a project called PlasticArmPit, in which Arm is developing smart chips made from thin sheets of plastic. Each chip will have eight different sensors and a built-in machine learning circuit.
It will look like a piece of cling-film with bits stuck to it, says James Myers at Arm. “PlasticArmPit will be the first application of machine learning in plastic electronics.”
Smells are made up of different combinations and concentrations of gases. The sensors on the chip will detect different chemicals in the air and the AI will take that complex data and identify it as a particular whiff.
The chip will then score the smell. If it is in the armpit of your shirt, it will tell you the strength of your body odour from 1 to 5, says Myers. “It’s the job of the machine learning to collect and interpret all the data and then alert the user if action is needed.”
E-noses are not new. Julian Gardner, who pioneered the technology at the University of Warwick, UK, has been building them for three decades. In 1993 he co-founded a company called Alpha MOS that sells e-noses to the food industry.
The trouble is that these devices cost around $20,000, says Gardner.
An AI-powered nose could also be tuned to pick up different types of smell. “Flexibility is important because beef doesn’t spoil in the same way as fish,” Bond says. “And a pork loin may be classed as spoiled, but still be suitable to be turned into sausage.”
See the full story here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032095-000-computer-chip-will-sniff-your-armpits-and-tell-you-when-you-have-bo/