The final frontier in the digital replication of the senses is definitely the hardest one to crack, our sense of smell.  The olfactory sense is far more complicated than even computer vision when it comes to digitally recreating it.

A trio of startups is rising to the challenge. 

Koniku, a Nigerian-based startup founded in 2015, is at the forefront of digitally recreating the olfactory experience and has inked a deal with Anheuser-Busch to help make tastier beer.  The deal involves Koniku’s device called the Konikore, which can best be described as a big purple nipple (pictured above).  The King of Beers will use the Konikore to computationally measure how a beverage’s aroma is perceived and experienced by the nose.

Better than the airport dog?  In the coming weeks, if you are lucky enough to travel, you may see the Konikore purple nose at an airport near you as the company is also partnering with Airbus to help with bomb detection. And that’s not all, folks.  Koniku has also signed a deal with electronic sensor manufacturer Thermo Fisher Scientific to sniff out traces of marijuana on people suspected of driving under the influence.

Why is it so difficult to digitally replicate the sense of smell?
Compared with what we know about vision and hearing, scientific understanding of the olfactory process is far behind.  There are around 400 different types of receptors in our noses that capture ambient molecules in the air which trigger a complex reaction.  This reaction creates a signal to our brains which is then interpreted as a particular smell and also involves other parts of the brain relating to memories. 

The Konikore actually contains tiny living nerve cells which are suspended inside a proprietary solution designed to replicate the nasal mucosa.  The nerve cells in the solution contain specific transmembrane proteins programmed to recognize odor molecules and are connected to a chip reader that interprets which receptors were triggered.

The other two startups in the game:

• Aromyx, based in Mountain View, California, isfocused on disease detection and is building an olfactory receptor-based platform for diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer and malaria.
   
• Aryballe, a French startup backed by Samsung and Hyundai, is making the NeOse, a handheld sensor that picks up odor molecules in the air and encodes them into data representing unique digital signatures.  Neural networks then compare that data to a massive database of previously analyzed smells to identify it.

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