A hybrid human sensory mimicking approach: an integrated e-nose and e-tongue system

Taste and smell are two of the five human senses that are common among mammalians. These two senses are usually used together to make up the brain’s perception of flavour. This has lead to the study of data fusion of multiple artificial sensory systems such as electronic nose and electronic tongue. However, the data fusions performed by these studies are based on separate single-modality systems. Presented is the development of a hybrid system which combines an electronic nose and electronic tongue in a single system. Both sub-system uses off-the-shelf components and developed using rapid prototyping techniques. The hybrid system combines two sensor arrays of MOS gas sensors and ion-selective electrodes. It also consists of a signalcollecting unit and pattern recognition software applied to a computer. The system uses qualitative analysis which is similar to the human sensory system, implementing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Three tests were performed representing agricultural, environmental and food production applications. The performance of the single-modality systems were compared to the hybrid system. The results show that the hybrid system performed better than the both single sub-systems when appropriate fusion method was used, and able to archive up to 98.67% accuracy. This proved that the multi-modality system performed better in samples discrimination than single-modality system which mimics more closely the human sensory system.