Malodour classification with low-cost flexible electronics

Abstract

Understanding body malodour in a measurable manner is essential for developing personal care products. Body malodour is the result of bodily secretion of a highly complex mixture of volatile organic compounds. Current body malodour measurement methods are manual, time consuming and costly, requiring an expert panel of assessors to assign a malodour score to each human test subject. This article proposes a technology-based solution to automate this task by developing a custom-designed malodour score classification system comprising an electronic nose sensor array, a sensor readout interface and a machine learning hardware fabricated on low-cost flexible substrates. The proposed flexible integrated smart system is to augment the expert panel by acting like a panel assessor but could ultimately replace the panel to reduce the test and measurement costs. We demonstrate that it can classify malodour scores as good as or even better than half of the assessors on the expert panel.

11‐5: Invited Paper: Evolving into an Era of Natively Flexible Smart Systems

“…A good example of an NFSS has been recently demonstrated by Pragmatic Semiconductor, Arm, University of Manchester and Unilever (8). This NFSS consisted of an electronic nose (e-nose) sensor array based on organic FETs fabricated on a PET substrate, and a flexible integrated circuit (FlexIC) combining a sensor readout interface with a digital processing engine fabricated with TFTs on a polyimide substrate.…”

Reprogrammable, intelligent soft origami LEGO coupling actuation, computation, and sensing

“… 10 In the field of soft controllers, soft components with embedded computation capability possess the ability to convert one constant input signal to multiple oscillatory output signals. 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 Advances in flexible sensors have expanded sensing capabilities to the detection of strain, 17 pressure, 18 temperature, 19 sweat, 20 and odor 21 using soft materials. With the current development in these fields, researchers such as Drotman et al.…”

Recent Progress of Fluorinated Conjugated Polymers

“…[1,2] These materials are promising due to their low cost, a degree of intrinsic elasticity, DOI: 10.1002/adma.202403961 readily molecular modification, and ease to process relatively to inorganic semiconductors. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] Various types of small molecules and polymers have been developed, and they have been afforded wide applications in organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), organic photovoltaics (OPVs), organic thermoelectrics, etc. [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] For polymers, most of them are conjugated polymers, especially consisting of donor (D) and acceptor (A) units, which are also well-known as D−A type conjugated polymers.…”