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With Mot'Olfactory, you can now carry around an "electronic nose" capable of smelling the world by sensing and recording (remembering) the unique "chemical signature" in the air and comparing it to "smells" you've recorded before or that match signatures in a database of smells and known compounds contributed by scientists, labs and other people like you around the world. SPEC Sensors is working to help build the first ever mobile phone capable of environmental gas and smell sensing, and with your contribution, we can make this a reality.
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Working with the Moto Mods™ development kit, we will be building a modification capable of working with your Moto Z on or off the phone. Moto Mods™ snap onto any Moto Z to give it a whole new superpower. They transform your phone allowing it to do things other phones can’t. To learn more about Moto Mods™ visit www.motomods.com. Even without the Moto Z, with internal Bluetooth capabilities and a standalone app this electronic nose will be able to work with any Android device.
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For instance, now you can smell your beer, and compare it to other beers (maybe that craft beer isn’t all that different than the mass produced one), or measure the alcohol and bitterness content of that beer. You can also find out if your feet are smellier than your friend's feet, or know when its time to ditch that old gym bag. This is also going to tell you which way you should go to avoid the smog on your afternoon run or walk, or discover what could be setting off your asthma in your home. As more and more people measure their surrounding environments (and those weird smells), we can start to collect a database of smells signatures to really know what is out there in our homes and our communities.
Mot'Olfactory is more than a nose for your phone, its a learning device and a crowd sourcing data platform capable of rapid and exponential knowledge expansion.....and it may just win you a bet with your friends.
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What We Need & What You Get
Our prototype Mot'Olfactory electronic nose includes three gas sensors, in addition to temperature, pressure, and humidity. This prototype has been thoroughly tested through an independent international campaign highlighting body odor sensing (New App Turns Smartphone Into High-Tech B.O. Detector) and we smelled bad B.O. with more than 75% accuracy using only two sensors!. What we want to bring to the world is not just body odor detection, but any odor detection. We will accomplish this feat using smart sensing technology and crowd-sourced data to compile a database of smells from around the world to help identify the smells around you.
What we need from you is a valuable contribution to help us meet our goal to turn this gas-sensor array into a mobile smelling platform. We have already put a great deal of work into the sensor and hardware design, including production, electronics, and calibration. Part of your contribution will be used for the hardware design to make this part of the Moto Mods™ collection and will be done in house, using the extensive expertise of our mechanical and electrical engineers together with our skilled production team. Our existing facility can easily adapt to produce small batches of our prototype e-nose, and we are excited to offer this to you as one of our company's several Perks.
We have already achieved outstanding results with this platform while monitoring levels of ozone and carbon monoxide. The following highlights the performance of our compact low cost carbon monoxide sensor operating side by side with scientific equipment roughly the size of an old desktop computer and about 1,000 times the cost.
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Our sensors are even being deployed as part of the Array of Things Project in the city of Chicago to measure their air quality! And since air quality is essential to our health, we will continue our partnership with technologies like CleanSpace to keep you breathing healthy air wherever you go.
And critically, your contribution will help develop the machine learning algorithms to take these high performance readings and identify smells much like one might identify a fingerprint, and to develop the crowd sourced data platform and app that will be the backbone of this very powerful device.
And if you are just looking for a cool app to smell your beer or your breath or your feet, then your contribution is going to help us with this too.
We have elected to make this a flexible funding campaign, so what this means for our backers is that if we do not make our goal for prototype development we would like to offer our backers something with similar technology and applications for their support. With that, we will be offering great discounts on sensor development kits if we cannot make our goals for the prototype design. So if we don't reach our goal, we won't be able to finish this product! But you will still get some really cool sensors you can use to build your own electric nose.
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Other Ways You Can Help
While you may not have the Moto Z or our Moto Z Mod, you can still help us reach our environmental and smell monitoring goals. We have made some perks available for the Maker. Perks that will help you build your own electric nose. For our sensor development kits, we have provided open source libraries to incorporate these digital and analog sensors into the most common and versatile microcontroller platforms. We would be very appreciative if you added your smells to our library.
Finally, if you know someone who is interested in air quality monitoring or they just need a new nose, send them our way (more polite then sending a bar of soap). Let them know we are passionate about a future where we can all take a healthy breath.
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