- [Narrator] Dogs have an incredible sense of smell.
It's estimated to be 10,000 to 100,000 times
more powerful than ours.
Could your smartphone ever compete?
Some dogs can even be trained to sniff out diseases,
like certain cancers, COVID, diabetes,
and they're actually pretty accurate.
- [Nikhil Lal] The dogs have done a fantastic job
of showing us what nature's capable of.
- [Narrator] Although the dogs themselves
aren't always reliable.
- It's really hard work for the dogs.
They have to concentrate really hard and they can get tired.
And also sometimes, they have a bad day.
And when we're dealing with some of these diseases,
we don't wanna risk that dog having a bad day
and us missing something that could be very important.
- [Narrator] Enter the electronic nose.
Researchers at MIT created an electronic nose
using chemical odor sensors.
- [Andreas Mershin] You're constantly leaking
biologically important information
from every pore of your body.
To the right nose, this can be mined for information.
- [Narrator] So what do diseases smell like?
- Cancer itself or even COVID
does not leave a trace in the form of a single molecule
that you can identify.
Your body odor, your various emissions contain
a bouquet of odorants.
What your body is doing,
let's say I'm fighting COVID, leaves an imprint.
That imprint is what the dog sees.
- [Narrator] How could an electronic nose do the same job?
Andreas Mershin and his research group at MIT
use a pump to pass an odor over an array of sensors,
which react differently to each molecule.
The signals from these sensors are sent to a computer
that interprets them using machine learning.
- So our artificial dog intelligence is trying to find
what is the essence without reducing it
to a list of names and concentrations.
We've generated the raw data, then we feed it
into the machine, and with machine learning algorithms,
we can now basically train it exactly as we do the dog.
The most interesting application is to make a nose
that can be trained on anything like the dog.
So today you train it on bombs,
the day after you train it on drugs,
the day after you train it on cancer.
- As far as these electronic noses are concerned,
this may be one of the most intimate forms of sensing.
What we've shown with olfaction is that you can learn
quite a bit about a person.
They give you this sense of individuality,
but also a very precise picture of the individual
from a health perspective as well.
- [Narrator] Just how accurate is this electronic nose?
- The question of the accuracy, the dogs are still
leading the way.
In all cases, the dogs are beating us,
but not because their noses are more sensitive
to individual molecules, but because
they can make more sense of the massive amount
of signal that they're getting.
The challenge is no longer in catching every last
little odorant. The challenge is making sense of it.
Inside the lab, you can clean up the air.
You can, you know, use very extremely controlled conditions.
And then you can say, "Oh, I've detected this.
I've detected that."
As soon as you take it outside the lab
where everybody's wearing perfume and smoking cigars,
it's the Wild West out there.
- [Narrator] Mershin's team hopes that the sensors
with the ability to smell will one day be incorporated
to smartphones.
- All of your technologies right now
on your body have cameras and microphones on them.
The one thing they're lacking is an ability to
sense the molecules in the air.
We will be able to have a stream of data
from all over the planet in real time, that is capable
of being mined, to identify diseases,
to find the boundaries of a pandemic,
to find emergent pandemics, to find other threats
such as pollution.
- [Narrator] Right now, the electronic nose
is mostly being used in lab settings,
but the potential for tech to collect information
raises concerns about the privacy and security
of health data.
For instance, could your smartphone detect health issues
of people you pass on the street
or come into close contact with?
Not quite yet.
- My preferred method is enabling it such that
the individual owns their data,
but that they can easily share it.
And so everyone can store their own small amounts
of data at home, in their own servers,
as long as they get to retain ownership to both share it
but also to remove it from the population as well.
- The opportunity is vast
but the challenge is trust.
You trust the dog.
Do you trust your insurance company
or your cell phone provider with your data?
No, you do not.
So we need to fix this trust.
- [Narrator] And right now there aren't any
federal privacy laws protecting consumer data.
- Imagine the amount of goodness you can create with this,
but also imagine the amount of bad you can do.
This technology must have coevolved with the laws
around it because it is far too powerful.