6. Digital Smell Interface

Technology in communication is rapidly growth in the past years. Scientist and researchers are competing to give the best way of connecting people through communication. Currently, our daily lives are deeply ingrained with digital communication and the technology now have been develop until all human senses could be digitize to have more interactive experience. Most of our daily activities can be captured, shared and experienced as images, audio, and video using digital devices. When we watch a movie, we experience the stimulation of sights and sounds. Then what about the sense of smell? This project presents the first digital technology developed for transmission of smell through digital networks. The digital stimulation of smell is considered as a useful step in expanding the technology related to multisensory communication. Previous methods for activating the sensation of smell chemically, has obvious disadvantages such as being complex, expensive and lower controllability. Most importantly, smells exist in molecular forms making it impossible to communicate over a distance. Therefore, generating smell sensations without chemicals is becoming highly significant for our increasingly digitized world. We propose a digital interface for actuating smell sensations. This is done by stimulating the olfactory receptors of the nasal concha using weak electrical pulses.