<title>Physiologically inspired pattern recognition for electronic noses</title>

Abstract

The electronic noise is a natural match for physiologically motivated chemical data analysis. Both the olfactory system and the electronic nose consist of an array of chemical sensing elements and a pattern recognition system. Physiologically motivated approaches to automated chemical analysis with electronic noses are discussed in this paper. Also, applications of electronic noses to environmental sensing, food processing, and medicine are referenced. The quantity and complexity of the data collected by sensor arrays can make conventional chemical analysis of data in an automated fashion difficult. One approach to odor or volatile compound identification is to build an array of sensors, where each sensor in the array is designed to respond to a specific chemical. With this approach, the number of unique sensors must be at least as great as the number of chemicals being monitored. It is both expensive and difficult to build highly selective chemical sensors. An alternative approach is to use sensors that have a broader response and rely on advanced information processing to discriminate between different chemicals. This latter approach was inspired by biological olfactory systems and is the approach incorporated in electronic noses to reduce the requirements on both the number and the selectivity of the sensors.