Taste hydrogels are administered to the mouth via small tubes
Shryn Chen
Electronic tongues that can replicate flavors like cake and fish soup can help you replicate food in virtual reality, but still can’t simulate anything else that affects taste, such as smell.
Yizhen Jia Ohio State University and his colleagues developed a system called e-Taste. This can solve a way to sample food and partially reproduce its flavor in someone’s mouth.
This includes using chemicals that correspond to five basic flavors. Sodium chloride, salty water, sour citric acid, glucose for sweetness, magnesium chloride for bitterness, umami glutamic acid. “These five flavors already explain the very large spectrum of food we have every day,” says Jia.
The system uses sensors to detect the levels of these chemicals in the food, convert them into digital measurements, pumping these values into a pump, and pushing a small amount of hydrogel containing different flavors into a small tube under a person’s tongue.
First, the researchers tested a system with a single flavor and asked how well the device reproduced sour on a 5-point scale, comparing it to a real sample of sour taste. They gave the same number for 70% of the time for the true sour thing that was reproduced.
The team then tested whether the system was able to replicate more complex flavors such as lemonade, cake, fried eggs, fish soup, coffee, etc., and asked a group of six if they could distinguish them, and felt they could have over 80% of the time.
However, I say it’s not very useful to focus on such flavors alone. Alan Chalmers Because other sensations are also involved in our taste at Warwick University in the UK. “Next time you have strawberries, close your nose and eyes. Strawberries are very sour, but are perceived as sweet because of their aroma and red colour. So if you send them just sour on your device, you’ll never know that they’re actually from strawberries.”
“This kind of electron can extract the amount of sweetness [and] It’s sour, but it’s not a taste for a human tongue,” he says.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
