Abstract
Electronic Nose (E-Nose) has been found suitable to assess quality of many agricultural and food products as well as this have immense potential in biomedical applications for early detection of diseases. However, the major challenge here is to develop a generic E-Nose platform that can be used in various application domains by the researchers. Since apart from sensors and electronic components, an E-Nose involves electromechanical parts for odour delivery to the sensors this is extremely difficult to develop a small, portable, low power device that would be rugged enough for continuous field usage.
This paper describes a generic handheld E-Nose platform that is rugged enough for field usage and suitable for applications in various domains like Agricultural and Horticultural produces and biomedical applications.
The E-Nose was first developed for applications in the tea industry to solve the following two problems:Assessment of quality of tea based on its aromaDetection of optimum Fermentation time during tea manufacturing processBased on the preliminary success in the tea domain, effort was made to make this platform generic so that various other domains may also be served. Effort towards miniaturization, reduction in power consumption, convenience of use were also given priority and finally we came out with a perfectly handheld, battery operated and field deployable generic E-Nose platform.
This generic platform is in use by the researchers in domains like tea, different spices, jasmine, cheese ripening, waste water quality detection, early detection of diabetes, etc.
This generic handheld E-Nose platform is developed on a 16-bit microprocessor platform, experimental data are stored in a SD Memory Card, user-input is through Touch Screen interface and results are displayed onto a Graphics display. A rechargeable battery pack powers the system continuously at least for 10 hours and miniature pump and valve are used for the odour delivery mechanism. A sensor array consisting of five MOS sensors are used for aroma sensing purpose.
