🔶 New technology created to transmit scents over the internet

🔶 New technology created to transmit scents over the internet

Since the advent of the internet, people have been able to easily share images and sounds in digital form.

Using billions of smartphones around the world, this has been an ordinary practice for years and no longer seems astonishing.

Now, researchers have unveiled a new technology that uses an electronic nose to detect specific scents—such as a distinctive coffee perfume—and then sends a command to a small, wearable device in another location to release the corresponding fragrant molecules.

This digital connection can be established at any distance, from two ends of a room to two points on opposite sides of the world.

Chunio Yang, a PhD student in materials science and engineering at Ohio State University, tells Reuters that the idea behind this technology is to add scent to the visual and audio information that we already share remotely, making these experiences more appealing.

The researchers have called this new achievement in digital scent technology “centronics.”

In this technology, whose information was published in a paper in the journal Science Advances, a machine-learning model classifies the scents that the electronic nose has been trained to identify: beer, cake, coffee, orange, and red wine.

In fact, this technology uses an online platform to transfer scent-related information to a scent-emitting device.

That device then releases aromatic materials to recreate the scent at the receiving location. However, according to the scientists, the aromatic molecules themselves are not transmitted through the internet.

According to them, the diameter of the electronic nose device is about 15 centimeters and it can be carried, although it is not designed to be worn.

At present, the electronic nose can only detect these five scents. Yang says: “We chose these scents because everyday familiar odors have different olfactory characteristics and therefore serve as suitable samples for demonstrating the system’s performance. We have not yet expanded the detection range beyond these categories.”