A Google AI employee is dedicated to finding ways to digitize smell, as reported by TechCrunch. Alex Wiltschko, who has a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard, studied how the brain processes odor. Along with Sandeep Datta, a Harvard professor, two have been studying scent and olfaction for years.
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Leah Holzel, 60, food editor, smells aromatic spices during an interview with AFP on March 22, 2021 in New York City. - Holzel, who had lost her sense of smell from 2016 to 2019, now coaches people who have lost their sense of smell due to Covid-19 and has helped six people recover from anosmia since the start of the pandemic.
They have been trying to gain a better understanding of how the human brain works, including why specific scents get tied to memories. However, they are not the first ones to think of digitizing scent. In fact, in July this year, Canaery raised $4 million in seed funding to develop a scent-sensing platform. Last year, Moodify started working on the digitization of scent and closed an $8 million round of funding.
Currently, there is a growing and stronger interest in smell from physicians and patients who have had their sense of smell affected due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This event also shone light to how little information we know about all aspects of the sense of smell.
Wiltschko, as a Google employee, became an entrepreneur-in-residence at GV (formerly Google Ventures), where he plans to build a company that can identify disease faster based on specific odor molecules.
GV has only appointed five life-science-focused EIRS in its 13-year history, and Wiltschko is one of them. Wiltschko plans to find a way to automate the sense of smell so we can better understand it, and what's even more exciting is, to capture it like how we capture images today.
He envisions to be able to make humans capable of smelling diseases to detect them earlier. Wiltschko also noted that he thinks now, there's a faster way to digitize our sense of smell; however, it's going to take a lot of hard work.
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Digitizing the Sense of Smell
There are a number of reasons digitizing smell can help in detecting diseases early. First, smell is complicated, and it's definitely not something that a computer can do at the moment. This is the reason why a number of tech companies are trying to find a way to make this possible.
A scented molecule is one of the most complicated substances to analyze, and it's not something computers are good at doing at the moment. These molecules contain carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Sometimes, there are also sulfuric compounds.
The human nose is capable of detecting these compounds, but for artificial intelligence to do that, it will need more data. The more data it has, the smarter it becomes.
The medical sector is the first to benefit from digitizing the sense of smell. However, the retail and food industry will also be able to use it, as it could help them identify new products, such as perfumes and
Related Article: The Human Sense Of Smell Is Better Than Previously Thought: How Did Our Sense Of Smell Evolve?
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Written by April Fowell
