Development of intelligent portable electronic nose

Abstract

An electronic nose is a device that is able to perform electronic olfactory as a substitute to human experts. It is able to overcome the disadvantages of using human, such as fatigue and inconsistencies, as well as to detect harmful volatile organic compounds. These advantages open up a myriad of possible applications which include food quality control, fruit ripeness and plant disease detection. The fact that the current commercial e-noses are costly and complicated, and rise in demand of such systems, has attracted many research groups around the world. This paper presents the development of a costeffective intelligent portable electronic nose. The development of the electronic nose used off-the-self an array of metal oxide sensors integrated with dsPIC33 microcontroller. The odourcapturing module was developed using inert and odourless Teflon to reduce the memory effect. The device offer rapid response, versatility and novelty in the detection of odour using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithm for pattern recognition. Initial results show that the electronic nose is able to discriminate samples based on their odour profile alone.