IBM has announced Hypertaste, an “e-tongue” that can quickly identify the flavors in liquids. The tech giant describes its solution as an “AI-powered electronic tongue” which can be used to fingerprint liquids that are not so suitable for ingestion, but may need to be identified more rapidly than is possible using traditional labs (think remote water quality checks and counterfeit alcohol testing).

A matter of convenience

Even though it is possible to analyze liquids by shipping them to a lab, such process can be long and expensive. IBM Hypertaste could become an alternative to this approach, enabling people to see the composition of a liquid in just one minute via a smartphone.

“IBM Hypertaste: An AI-assisted e-tongue for fast and portable fingerprinting of complex liquids” by IBM Research, YouTube.

The e-tongue uses a concept called combinatorial sensing, which involves individual sensors simultaneously responding to various chemicals in a liquid. The result is a “fingerprint” of the liquid. The device was conceived with off-the-shelf electronics and works with a mobile app to transfer data to the cloud. Once the data is on the server, a machine learning framework provides results on the user’s phone based on a database of other liquids. According to IBM, different machine learning models can be utilized, hence it would be possible to use the same e-tongue device for different tasks.

“We’re very good as humans at being able to recognize different liquids,” Patrick Ruch, a researcher working on the project, told Digital Trends. “While we can’t necessarily work out the exact quantities of components within liquids, we can do things like recognize the same liquid over and over again. That’s something we set out to replicate with this project.” he added.

Potentially useful in many industries

Hypertaste could become useful in many industries, including the food and beverage sector, environmental work which takes place in remote areas, as well as the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. For example, packaged beverages could be quickly tested on-site to determine if they actually contain the beverage shown on the packaging.

“It could be very useful for any scenario in which you want to check the composition of a particular liquid very quickly,” Ruch explains. “For instance, if you want to check that a particular food has come from the producer it says on the label this could be used. You can also imagine it in the case of non-foodstuffs, where an industrial supplier is supplying you with raw materials and you want to be sure that it’s always coming from the same place. You can easily re-label liquid, but you can’t change the chemical identity of the liquid without changing its function.”

Hypertaste could become useful in many industries, including the food and beverage sector, environmental work which takes place in remote areas, as well as the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries.

“The goal is definitely to grow the database of liquids… We’ve shown off the platform as a proof-of-principle, so the next step would be to create modifications depending on the use case.” Ruch concludes.