Kind: captions
Language: en
dogs have an incredible sense of smell
it's estimated to be ten thousand to a
hundred thousand times more powerful
than ours could your smartphone ever
compete
some dogs can even be trained to sniff
out diseases
like certain cancers covid diabetes
and they're actually pretty accurate
the dogs have done a fantastic job of
showing us what nature's capable of
although the dogs themselves aren't
always reliable
really hard work for the dogs they have
to concentrate really hard and they can
get tired and also sometimes they have a
bad day
and when we're dealing with some of
these diseases we don't want to risk
that dog having a bad day and us missing
something that could be very important
enter the electronic nose
researchers at mit created an electronic
nose using chemical odor sensors you are
constantly leaking biologically
important information from every pore of
your body to the right nose this can be
mined for information
so what do diseases smell like cancer
itself or even covet does not leave a
trace in the form of a single molecule
that you can identify your body order
your various emissions contain a bouquet
of odorants what your body is doing
let's say i'm fighting covet leaves an
imprint that imprint is what the dog
sees how could an electronic nose do the
same job
andreas mercian and his research group
at mit use a pump to pass an odor over
an array of sensors which react
differently to each molecule the signals
from these sensors are sent to a
computer that interprets them using
machine learning so our artificial dog
intelligence is trying to find what is
the essence without reducing it to a
list of names and concentrations we've
generated the raw data then we feed it
into the machine and with machine
learning algorithms we can now basically
train it exactly as we do the dog the
most interesting application is to make
a nose that can be trained on anything
like the dog so today you train it on
bumps the day after you traded on drugs
the day after you traded on cancer as
far as these electronic noses are
concerned this may be one of the most
intimate forms of sensing what we've
shown with olfaction is that you can
learn quite a bit about a person they
give you this sense of
individuality but also a very precise
picture of the individual from a health
perspective as well
just how accurate is this electronic
nose
the question of the accuracy the dogs
are still leading the way in all cases
the dogs are beating us but not because
their noses are more sensitive to
individual molecules but because they
can make more sense of the massive
amount of signal that they're getting
the challenge is no longer in catching
every last little odorant the challenge
is making sense of it
inside the lab you can clean up the air
you can you know use very extremely
controlled conditions and then you can
say oh i've detected this i've detected
that as soon as you take it outside the
lab where everybody's wearing perfume
and smoking cigars it's a wild west out
there martian's team hopes that the
sensors with the ability to smell will
one day be incorporated to smartphones
all of your technologies right now on
your body have cameras and microphones
on them one thing they're lacking is an
ability to sense the molecules in the
air
we will be able to have a stream of data
from all over the planet in real time
that is capable of being mined to
identify diseases to find the boundaries
of a pandemic to find emergent pandemics
to find other threats such as pollution
right now the electronic nose is mostly
being used in lab settings but the
potential for tech to collect
information raises concerns about the
privacy and security of health data
for instance could your smartphone
detect health issues of people you pass
on the street or come into close contact
with
not quite yet
my preferred method is enabling it such
that the individual owns their data but
that they can easily share it and so
everyone can store their own small
amounts of data at home in their own
servers as long as they get to retain
ownership to both share it but also to
remove it from the population as well
the opportunity is vast but the
challenge is trust you trust a dog do
you trust your insurance company or your
cell phone provider with your data no
you do not so we need to fix this trust
and right now there aren't any federal
privacy laws protecting consumer data
imagine the amount of
goodness you can create with us but also
imagine the amount of bads you could do
this technology must have co-evolved
with the laws around it because it is
far too powerful
you