Transmission of olfactory information for tele-medicine
While the inclusion of visual, aural, and tactile senses into virtual reality systems is widespread, the sense of smell has been largely ignored. We have developed a chemical vapor sensing system for the automated identification of chemical vapors (smells). Our prototype chemical vapor sensing system is composed of an array of tin-oxide vapor sensors coupled to an artificial neural net-work. The artificial neural network is used in the recognition of different smells and is constructed as a standard multilayer feed-forward network trained with the backpropagation algorithm. When a chemical sensor array is combined with an automated pattern identifier, it is often referred to as an electronic or artificial nose. Applications of electronic noses include monitoring food and beverage odors, automated flavor control, analyzing fuel mixtures, and quantifying individual components in gas mixtures. Our prototype electronic nose has been used to identify odors from common household chemicals. An electronic nose will potentially be a key component in an olfactory input to a telepresent virtual reality system. The identified odor would be electronically transmitted from the electronic nose at one site to an odor generation system at another site. This combination would function as a mechanism for transmitting olfactory information for telepresence. This would have direct applicability in the area of telemedicine since the sense of smell is an important sense to the physician and surgeon. In this paper, our chemical sensing system (electronic nose) is presented along with a proposed method for regenerating the transmitted olfactory information.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest Lab., Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC06-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 10127440
- Report Number(s):
- PNL-SA-25677; CONF-950162-1; ON: DE95007269; TRN: 95:002303
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Medicine meets virtual reality,San Diego, CA (United States),19-22 Jan 1995; Other Information: PBD: Jan 1995
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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