Can your AI say if You need a Shower? If You Stink, Maybe it will!
Will your AI say if you need a shower? Well, AI can clearly point to surpassing humans in some domains.
In our homes and pockets, there are electronic devices that can hear, see, and feel our touches. Your smartphone can probably do all three. What’s missing? The AI-driven smell technology. The technology for making smelling smartphones is approaching reality. MIT researchers and inventors believe that we are probably five years away, and perhaps a little further when AI will be smart enough to say if you need a shower. Put it completely on the phone from where it is now. And we’re talking about putting it in 100 million phones.
Siri doesn’t always say if you need a shower (although it may be of help for some people). There is a greater public health mission. It replicates the dog’s incredible disease detection capabilities in a more portable and accessible way to detect insidious diseases early. Dogs can smell cancer, Parkinson’s disease, malaria, and other conditions that cause changes in human body odor. Studies on the ability of dogs to smell Covid-19 have also been published.
Scientists can train more and more dogs to help detect and use the disease around the world. However, this type of training is expensive, difficult, and time-consuming. Also, not everyone likes dogs, and not everyone is happy to be sniffed by dogs before a basketball game or during a doctor’s appointment. In essence, the hope of scientists is to develop a robotic nose to detect disease in a way that dog noses can. There has always been the idea that dogs convert what they know with their nose into electronic devices. One of the attractions of robotic noses is that researchers have been able to advance AI-driven robotic noses without having to fully understand how biological noses work. That is the central mystery.
The Challenge of Robot Noses Explained
Scientists know many of the basic mechanisms of the sense of smell. You know that deep in our robotic noses are special receptors that interact with the odor molecules we inhale. And they know that these receptors signal the brain. What they don’t know is why things smell like them. So why is one odour molecule smelling one and a similarly shaped odor molecule smelling another? It’s still a mystery.
So how do you make an AI-powered robotic nose? The first idea was to be able to make something that could directly detect the odor molecule itself, such as a carbon monoxide detector. When odorous molecules enter the detector, the alarm sounds in the same way that carbon monoxide gas enters the CO detector. You can use real olfactory receptors that have grown inside the cell. Then they distribute the receptors on the circuit board. (All sensory receptors exist to convert the outside world into electrical signals that our brain can understand. In this case, the signals are sent to the circuit instead.) Receptors were expected to pick up nearby scented molecules. However, the team noticed that the alarm didn’t sound often because it needed to detect so many molecules and so many odors bounced off. Therefore, the team decided not to build this machine.
For their next attempt, which they called the Nano-Nose, they tried something different.
Previous versions aimed to detect individual molecules, but this time they looked at the big picture, the overall odor. The smell isn’t just a combination of molecules. It’s a specific way that those molecules interact with complex receptors in the nose. It’s still a mystery how they all combine. Nano-Nose is the electricity produced by. Scientists drew an enthusiastic pattern from my activity. The scented receptor display looked like a stock ticker. They created a specific pattern that the computer (that is, the brain) can recognize. Basically, it uses machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence) to enable Nano-Nose to recognize odors in a unique way. Interestingly, dogs that sniff illness are also trained this way. Nano-Nose is what you need to detect a test, and Nano-Nose has taught you how to detect odors.
Ultimately, we showed that this AI-based Nano-Nose can detect odors at real receptors. Research assistance to prepare Nano-Nose for everyday applications. Previous iterations were desktop-sized, but they have reduced the technology to fit on smartphones.
Noses in our phones could help save lives
Nano-Nose needs further training before it can actually smell the disease in everyday situations. In the real world, there are countless odors. This is a very different situation from a clean and controlled environment. To overcome this hurdle, the receptor must be exposed to more odors to improve the algorithm. But the basic proof of concept is there, and the smelling phone may not be too late. Giving the phone a new way to monitor our behavior raises some clear concerns about it. You may be worried about the privacy implications, but the benefits are clear. The nose of a pocket-sized AI robot can help save lives. If you wait 6 months, you may be sentenced to death. However, if your mobile phone can detect a change in odour, you may be notified sooner.
