This electronic ‘nose’ could help combat the risk of food poisoning

Most of the time, the human nose is unable to detect the presence of bacteria in food. — AFP Relaxnews

A startup has developed a new technology, aided by artificial intelligence, to detect the presence of dangerous bacteria in food. Deployed on a large scale, it could help reduce the risk of food poisoning, among other things.

Sensifi has succeeded in developing a kind of artificial nose, which uses advanced sensors capable of identifying volatile organic compounds emitted by pathogenic bacteria present in food – such as salmonella, listeria and E. coli – even at very low concentrations. When compounds that can be emitted by these types of bacteria are detected, an alert is sent to a computer responsible for analysing the data in order to identify exactly what is involved.