Smell Phones

Before moving to the concept of smell phones, 

A Brief Statistics on the use of mobile phones over the recent years .. 

  These were the usage statistics in India until 2011, taken with over a 56 crore mobile subscribers.

  The above details shows that mobile was mainly used for voice communication alone. But, with  the advent of technology, phones became much more interactive, ie smarter, it will take one to a world of different services and applications and smart phones became available.

 Cognitive Enabled Phones

 What is a cognitive enabled phone?????

•  Currently smart phones offer a variety of services such as internet, VOIP, GPS, multimedia, video calling and a whole variety of different services. 

• In addition to the services provided to the end-user, by smart phones, these type of phones will have the ability to interact with the surroundings. 

•  They will produce some kind of response based on the input from the surroundings based on some policies, rules set forth by law.

• In short, in addition to the facilities provided by the smart phones, cognitively enabled phones will have some sort of intelligence to interact with the surroundings.

One such example of a cognitive enabled device is the smell phone.

 Now,

 What is smell??????

• Materials with temperatute above 273K emit different types of  radiations.

• Chemicals in the materials may vaporise and they mix with the atmosphere around the material.

• The odor of these chemicals is perceived as smell by our nose.  

 The block diagram of the Human Nasal System is as shown below 

• Olfactory Receptor Cells are the ones responsible for the perception of smells from our surroundings.

• These cells have Cilia at one end and Axons the other end.

• Humans have over 4 crores of such cells for perceiving various smells. 
• The number of cells do matter...(German Sheperds have 200 crores of such cells, thus they have more of such instincts than human beings)
• These cells produce produce some kind of electric signals corresponding to the smell and these signals are transferred to the olfactory bulb.
• These signals are transferred to Olfactory Cortex, Hypothalamus .etc by electro-chemical transmission within the cells.
• The processing of these electric signals gives us the sense of smell.
• The system responsible for perception of smells is the Limbic System.
• An electronic device which is functionally similar to our nose is called Electronic Nose (E-Nose).