AI-Powered 'Electronic Nose' Sniffs Out Meat Freshness

A team of scientists led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has invented an artificial olfactory system that mimics the mammalian nose to assess the freshness of meat accurately. The'electronic nose' (e-nose) comprises a'barcode' that changes colour over time in reaction to the gases produced by meat as it decays, and a barcode'reader' in the form of a smartphone app powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The e-nose has been trained to recognise and predict meat freshness from a large library of barcode colours. When tested on commercially packaged chicken, fish and beef meat samples that were left to age, the team found that their deep convolutional neural network AI algorithm that powers the e-nose predicted the freshness of the meats with a 98.5 per cent accuracy. As a comparison, the research team assessed the prediction accuracy of a commonly used algorithm to measure the response of sensors like the barcode used in this e-nose.