Sweet smell of start-up: Phone app that can detect scent

Published: 2 April 2018

Last updated: 4 March 2024

YOUR SMARTPHONE MAY soon be able to identify and analyse scent as easily as it scans a QR code or recognises a voice. A Haifa-based company, Nanoscent, has developed an electronic nose that can detect odours and flavours through a smartphone. As an extra bonus, the technology might also help jump-start your love life, the company says.

Co-founded by Oren Gavriely and Eran Rom, Nanoscent is developing a smartphone app that, used together with a chip called a “scent recorder,” can determine users’ scent profile and help them select products, e.g., cosmetics, perfumes and soaps, best suited for them.

Nanoscent’s technology uses the interactions between the sensor and the chemical substances emitted from our body to generate a distinct pattern, or fingerprint, for each scent. It then uses this data to train its algorithm to identify different kinds of smells.

Once developed, the technology would possibly be the first that would allow smartphones to have the sense of smell, he said.

The core technology behind Nanoscent was invented by Hossam Haick, an Arab Israeli professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Haick, the company’s chief scientific officer, first used the technology to detect breast cancer in patients by recognizing the changes in the smell of breast tissue nearly ten years ago.

FULL STORY Start-up sets sights on scent as new frontier for smartphone apps (Times of Israel)

Image: Professor Haick, and Nanoscent’s scent analyser