This AI-powered ‘electronic tongue’ in development can detect if your food is spoiled or rotten

This โ€œelectronic tongueโ€ can tell the difference between different coffee blends, let you know when juice has gone bad and detect harmful chemicals in water. Credit: Saptarshi Das Lab/Penn State
This โ€œelectronic tongueโ€ can tell the difference between different coffee blends, let you know when juice has gone bad and detect harmful chemicals in water. Credit: Saptarshi Das Lab/Penn State

Ever wondered if that old carton of fruit juice in the back of your fridge is still safe to drink? A new โ€œelectronic tongueโ€ could tell you. The system, powered byย artificial intelligence (AI), can identify issues with food safety and freshness. It also offers a glimpse at how AI makes decisions, researchers reported [October 9th] in the journalย Nature.

To make the tongue, researchers used an ion-sensitive field-effect transistor โ€” a device that detects chemical ions. The sensor collects information about the ions in a liquid and turns that information into an electrical signal that can be interpreted by a computer.

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In the new system, the sensor acts as the tongue, while AI plays the role of the gustatory cortex, theย brain regionย responsible for perceiving taste. The team linked the sensor to an artificial neural network, a machine learning program that mimics the way the human brain processes information, to process and interpret the data that the sensor collected.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

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