You’ve got robots doing surgery, and carrying trays and laundry, even fluffing your pillows. And now there’s also a box you can breathe into to see if you might have lung cancer.
But a professor of chemistry at Caltech, Nate Lewis, thinks he’s got something even better, an electronic nose.
It’s not a nose of course, but it works like one. Lewis is developing something called sensory vapor technology, according to a story at gizmodo.com, which,” in essence is an electronic way to sniff out bombs and certain illnesses and even something like Anthrax, avoiding any of the risks such scenarios would pose to an actual human-flesh nose."
Heather McCaig, a student working with Lewis in the lab, points out that in the past, we used canaries in the mines to check for poisonous gases. (We even have an expression, “a canary in a coal mine,” to serve as a warning!) But this was dangerous, of course, to the birds, and to the miners, too.
The eNose is still “in utero,” but when perfected, the device will be fitted with technology that can be used by a doctor to sniff you and see if you have tuberculosis or another disease, and start treatment immediately, without waiting for a sample to come back from the lab and lose time in between. All attached to your smartphone.
Lewis’s lab is working on this technology that can sniff out not just diseases, but bombs, dangerous toxins and beyond, to spare humans from having to be the ones to find where they are.
NASA began working on a similar solution, back in 2004, to protect astronauts from inhaling the ammonia that ironically kept the spaceship habitable but was toxic to the spacemen.
It all works with sensors, a portable chemical vapor detection kit and a phone with an electronic nose that can detect even things like breast cancer, all from how you smell.
Sciencedaily.com notes that work on this has been going on for over a decade, this development of electronic devices was developed to detect and recognize odors. But this was all before the advent of the smartphone and all the things it can do. It was originally developed to detect “the pleasantness of novel odors,” according to the Web site.
No matter its history or type of use, the eNose could help
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
