Let’s see, we have bionic hearts, electronic eyes and now even noses. What next? Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology are currently working on a chemical sensor which is capable of mimicking the olfactory system in animals in certain aspects, making us wonder whether it is able to pick up the nasty spray of a skunk.
The technology is based on interactions between chemical species and semiconducting sensing materials placed on top of MEMS microheater platforms developed at NIST. (See “NIST ‘Microhotplate’ May Help Search for Extraterrestrial Life,” NIST Tech Beat, Oct., 2001.) The electronic nose employed in the current work is comprised of eight types of sensors in the form of oxide films deposited on the surfaces of 16 microheaters, with two copies of each material. Precise control of the individual heating elements allows the scientists to treat each of them as a collection of “virtual” sensors at 350 temperature increments between 150 to 500 °C, increasing the number of sensors to about 5,600. The combination of the sensing films and the ability to vary the temperature gives the device the analytical equivalent of a snoot full of sensory neurons.
No idea on how this is able to be implemented in humans, but at least it can be used to sniff out bombs and stuff – hopefully anyways.
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