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For years, research teams around the world have been working to improve the quality of the “electronic tongue” to reach a copy close to the human sense of taste. However, achieving this dream has faced challenges, and a research team from South Korea claims that it has succeeded in overcoming them, by arriving at the closest electronic copy that mimics the complexities of the sense of taste. Human taste.
The “electronic tongue” can distinguish between different flavors and quantitatively evaluate detailed features, making it a potential tool for developing new products and quality control. It consists of:
- First- Sensors: These are its basic components, and mimic the taste buds found on the human tongue, and are designed to detect different taste compounds. These devices can vary based on the specific application, but they often include different types of chemical or biological sensors that are sensitive to tastes such as sweetness, salinity, acidity, and bitterness. These sensors generate signals in response to the presence and concentration of specific taste compounds.
- Second – Data acquisition system: This part collects signals from sensors, and includes techniques that convert sensor signals into digital data.
- Third: Data analysis tools: Once the data is collected, it is analyzed using advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques. This step interprets the sensor responses, compares them to known taste profiles, and identifies the taste compounds present in the sample.
Challenges on the road to achievement
According to this concept of the electronic tongue, research teams around the world have succeeded in producing copies of it that are used in the food and beverage industry, to monitor quality, taste test, evaluate food and beverage components, analyze flavors, detect contaminants, and monitor the production process.
It was also employed in evaluating the taste and composition of medicines, which helps in developing the formulation, ensuring consistency of taste, and detecting any differences or impurities.
Some research is exploring its use in monitoring water quality, evaluating environmental samples, and identifying and measuring the various compounds present in them, which contributes to pollution control efforts. Some research is also exploring its use in medical diagnosis, such as detecting biomarkers in body fluids or evaluating the taste of oral medications for patients suffering from diabetes. Problems with taste perception.
While “electronic tongues” have shown promising results in these areas, their widespread adoption is still limited, as this technology still faces several challenges, the most notable of which are:
- Complexity of taste perception: Human taste perception is complex, involving interactions between taste compounds that can create synergistic or suppressive effects, and accurately replicating this complexity in an electronic system is difficult.
- Reliability in dynamic conditions: Ensuring consistent and reliable results in variable or dynamic conditions is a major challenge, and external factors such as temperature, pH changes, or the presence of interfering substances can affect the accuracy of taste detection.
- Data interpretation and error handling: Analyzing taste data accurately and efficiently represents a major challenge that requires distinguishing between flavours, especially subtle differences, and addressing errors or inconsistencies in the data, which requires advanced algorithms.
- Selectivity and sensitivity: Achieving high selectivity and sensitivity in detecting specific compounds or taste patterns while avoiding interference from unrelated substances is another challenge, and distinguishing between similar tastes or compounds can be difficult.
What did the Koreans do?
In the context of seeking to improve technology by overcoming these challenges, researchers from the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology announced their success in reaching the closest electronic copy of the human tongue, and announced the results of their findings in a published study. On patrol “ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.”
The secret of the achievement achieved by Korean researchers lies in three advantages that were revealed press release Published by the website of the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology:
- First: integrating sensors and deep learning
Korean research teams have succeeded in creating a system that effectively integrates taste sensors with deep learning technology. This integration allows for simultaneous and accurate measurement of salinity, acidity, bitterness and sweetness. In contrast, previous attempts focused more on the sensing aspect without deep integration with advanced machine learning or deep learning algorithms for taste analysis.
- Second: improving accuracy and reliability
The Korean research addressed the limitations in accuracy and reliability seen in previous studies by introducing a custom deep learning algorithm for taste analysis, and this greatly enhanced the technology’s ability to classify different tastes with a probability of over 95%. Previous technologies lacked such advanced algorithms, resulting in limitations in taste differentiation and evaluation.
- Third: Application capabilities
The Korean research highlights the broad applicability of the system across various industries, including food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, which was not achieved with previous versions, as they did not achieve this diversity of use across various industries.
The research team tested their version with six different types of wine, and conducted taste experiments on it. Their new version succeeded in classifying the six different types of wine with more than 95% accuracy, which proves the wide applicability of this version, as its capabilities are expected to expand to include various fields such as food and beverage development, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
“We have confirmed that our new version can distinguish tastes with high probability through testing with wine, and we will continue to test it in the food industry and various fields, such as cosmetics or the pharmaceutical industry,” says Kyung In Jang, a professor at the Department of Robotics and Mechanical and Electronic Engineering at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology. .
Well deserved praise…and extra effort
According to the results reached by the researchers in the Korean study, Professor of Nutrition at the Egyptian Agricultural Research Center, Mahmoud Mohammadi, expresses his admiration for the great strides that have been made in overcoming the challenges faced by electronic tongue technology, as the effective combination of taste sensors and deep learning technology to interpret different tastes is promising. , a laudable step towards mimicking human taste.
Despite this deserved praise, he believes that leprosy, with the latest version approaching the capabilities of the human sense of taste, requires additional effort from researchers to conduct further experiments. Mohammadi said in a telephone interview with Al Jazeera Net: “There is a need to test a larger number of compounds, expand the data set for testing, and conduct more comprehensive applied experiments in the real world that go beyond the taste experiments conducted by researchers.”
He also confirms that stating the possibility of application in various industries, including food, cosmetics and medicines, requires additional studies, and this result cannot be reached based on what was achieved in the experiment carried out by the Korean research.
“There may be aspects that have not been fully explored regarding the potential for transferring this technology across various sectors, and this can only be discovered through practical experiments,” he adds.
