SNIFFING OUT DISEASE FEATURE“BY UNDERSTANDING
YOUR OWN BODY SMELLS,
YOU WILL BE IN CHARGE
AND THE DOCTOR WILL
BE THE LAST PERSON
YOU TURN TO”
byROSIE MALLETT(@R osi e M a ll et t)
Rosie is a freelance science writer, who specialises
in health and medicine.Technology in the USA, says we live with
our smartphones 24/7 so it makes sense
to use them to keep tabs on our health.
His vision is to create an artificially
intelligent, dog-like nose. This ‘nano-nose’
would constantly monitor your smell from
your phone. It could even save your life.
“Eventually it might even be something
you install inside your body so you never
lose it,” he says.
Mer sh i n h a s been lea r n i ng how to
perfect his nano-nose from the Medical
Detection Dogs in the UK, and he and
his colleagues have created a device even
more sensitive than the dog’s nose. But
t he e-nose has a f unda mental f law: it
doesn’t have a brain.
“We made a big mistake when we thought
the dogs are so good just because their
nose is so sensit ive,” he says. “A dog
can learn to detect a type of cancer in a
sample. Then that dog, without additional
training, can spontaneously recogniseother types of cancer – even though they
have no identical molecules. So the dog
understands something more than just
the volatiles that are flying around. No
machine can achieve that.”
The key, he believes, is i n how t he
handler trains the dog. “I want the phone
to be your dog and you to be the handler- it learns your personalised scents so
when they change, it can warn you,” says
Mershin. It will alert you, for instance, if
a mole becomes malignant. “Maybe your
phone says, ‘you know what, you should
probably see a dermatologist, something
is smelling iffy’.”
The e-nose cou ld become t he most
powerful diagnostic tool developed to date.
It will allow us to flip the responsibility for
healthcare on its head, Mershin predicts.
“By understanding your own body smells,
you will be in charge and the doctor will
be the last person you turn to.”
SHUT TERSTOCK, GET T Y IMAGES, ANDREAS MERSHIN