To Örebro University

The concept of the “electronic tongue” has been used in some experiments to establish the needs of fast and virtual monitoring of aqueous samples, e.g., in the monitoring of drinking water quality. More specifically, the performance of a proposed multi-electrode sensor system, used for voltammetric analysis of aqueous samples, is described. It is, for example, shown how such an “electronic tongue” can be used to monitor the quality of water in a production plant for drinking water. It is pointed out that conventional techniques often determine single concentration of the measured test while in many areas of measurement technology the methodology to extract adequate information from the environment, e.g., the electronic tongue, makes a total water quality estimate based on predetermined constraints extracted from complicated pattern structures. In this approach, experiments are conducted using an electronic tongue to virtually monitor the drinking water quality, measured from the raw water in the river to the tap water of the consumer. It can be shown that a system based on the proposed multi-electrode virtual sensor system is able to detect water quality changes. In these experiments, with the use of signal analysis and statistical multivariate methods we are able to estimate the water quality

A sensor system suitable for measuring qualitative changes In the chemical and the bacterial content in drinking water is presented. The sensor, an electronic tongue, is based on a voltammetric technique and is therefore robust, simple and sensitive to small changes of water quality in the measured sample. The sensor system is constructed so the liquid sample will flow through the sensing unit while measuring continuously. The sensor has a solid construction, does not contain any fragile parts and is independent of how it is positioned. This creates new approaches and the sensor can easily be mounted on a underwater vehicle for continuous inspection of drinking water reservoirs and continuously monitor the quality of the water as well as be mounted directly on a drinking water tap.

This paper focuses on the assumption that sensor system for personal use has optimal performance if coherent with the human perception system. Therefore, we provide arguments for this idea by demonstrating two examples. The first example is a personal taste sensor for use in finding abnormal ingredients in food. The second application is a mobile sniffing system, coherent with the behavior of a biological system when detecting unwanted material in hidden structures, e.g. explosives in a traveling bag

The problem of food- and water quality assessment is important for many practical applications, such as food industry and environmental monitoring. In this article we present a method for fast online quality assessment based on electronic tongue measurements. The idea is implemented in two steps. First we apply a fuzzy clustering technique to obtain prototypes corresponding to good and bad quality from a set of training data. During the second, online step we evaluate the membership of the current measurement to each cluster and make a decision about its quality. The result is presented to the user in a simple and understandable way, similar to the concept of traffic light signals. Namely, good quality is indicated with by a green light, bad quality with a red one, and a yellow light is a warning signal. The approach is demonstrated in two case studies: quality assessment of drinking water and baby food.