Towards an artificial olfactory mucosa for improved odour classification

Here, we report on a biologically inspired analytical system that represents a new concept in the field of machine olfaction. Specifically, this paper describes the design and fabrication of a novel sensor system, based upon the principle of ‘nasal chromatography’, which emulates the human olfactory mucosa. Our approach exploits the physical positioning of a series of broadly tuned sensors (equivalent to the olfactory epithelium) along the length of a planar chromatographic channel (analogous to the thin mucus coating of the nasal cavity) from which we extract both spatial (response magnitude) and temporal (retentive delay) sensor signals. Our study demonstrates that this artificial mucosa is capable of generating both spatial and temporal signals which, when combined, create a novel spatio-temporal representation of an odour. We believe that such a system not only offers improved odour discrimination over a sensor arraybased electronic nose, but also shorter analysis times than conventional gas chromatographic techniques.