Cancer has a smell. Someday your phone may detect it.
In our homes and in our pockets, there are electronics that can hear, see, and sense our touch. Your smartphone probably does all three. What’s missing: technology that can smell. But this may be changing, as detailed on the latest episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s weekly podcast exploring unanswered questions in science.
The technology to make smartphones that smell is nearing reality, says Andreas Mershin, a research scientist and inventor at MIT. “I think we’re maybe five years away, maybe a little bit less,” he says, “to get it from where it is now to fully inside of a phone. And I’m talking [about deploying it] into a hundred million phones.”
The idea isn’t necessarily to have Siri tell you when you need a shower (though, that could be helpful for some people). There’s a bigger public-health mission: Replicate the incredible disease detection capabilities of dogs in a more portable, accessible form to help flag insidious illnesses early on.
Dogs can smell cancer, Parkinson’s, malaria, and other conditions that cause changes in human body odor. There’s even published research on dogs’ ability to smell Covid-19.
Scientists could train more and more dogs to aid in disease detection, and deploy them around the world. But this kind of training is expensive, difficult, and time-consuming. Plus, not everyone likes dogs, and not everyone would appreciate being sniffed by a dog before a basketball game or during a doctor’s appointment.
https://www.vox.com/unexplainable/22323113/unexplainable-smell-mystery-nanonose
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I would describe it as kind of a "dead mouse" smell, but most humans don't detect it until too late. Dogs and even cats can before we do.
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