Kennesaw State University assistant professor Taeyeong Choi recently secured a grant to design an "electronic nose," or e-nose, capable of more accurately evaluating food safety.
"Food safety is a really important issue for the public," Choi explained to EurekAlert! News, "and I realized that millions of people are affected by foodborne illness each year."
Funded by the National Science Foundation, Choi's work involves using artificial intelligence to train his e-nose to analyze various volatile organic compounds — substances that can easily evaporate at room temperature, releasing gases that may or may not be hazardous to humans — to detect foodborne contaminants.
Although the "sniff test" can help you err on the safe side when it comes to confirming the status of your food, it's not always enough to detect more latent pathogens like Salmonella and E. coli.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates about 48 million incidents of foodborne illness each year, including roughly 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths.
Current food-safety examinations do similarly draw upon AI, but have so far been restricted to image scans, which allow no greater depth of analysis than the human eye. Developing an electronic "nose" enables recognition of what may, in many cases, be otherwise invisible.
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Foodborne pathogens, which typically enter the body through contaminated soil and water sources or through human cross-contamination, can pose considerable risks to human health, many of which are severe.
Salmonella infections, for instance, can lead to nausea, vomiting, and fever, and can spread to other parts of the body, including the bloodstream and bones, according to the CDC. Likewise, norovirus illnesses yield symptoms such as diarrhea, body aches, and dizziness, often leaving the victims severely dehydrated.
Choi's upcoming research could prove a game-changer for how we assess and consume food, but more importantly, having a way to vet our food more accurately can reduce the amount we accidentally throw out due to incorrect suspicions.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, nearly one-fifth of all food produced worldwide is wasted, resulting in over one billion metric tons of food waste annually.
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Majorly 😥 In addition to leaving a large portion of our global population with disproportionate levels of food insecurity, avoidable food waste significantly contributes to our landfill problem. When landfills overflow, they release heat-trapping gases like methane into the atmosphere and other toxins into our soil and water, driving up global temperatures and negatively affecting the natural resources we consume.
Currently, Choi's e-nose is designed to target common pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella in food samples, according to EurekAlert!, but future experimentation could expand this research into live disease recognition technology.
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