A Soft and Flexible Artificial Tongue for Pungency Perception

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Chemical Sensing
• Biomimetic Technology

Background:

• Artificial tongues aim to replicate human taste perception for basic tastes.
• Detecting spiciness (pungency) is crucial for food selection but challenging for artificial systems.
• Milk's ability to alleviate pungent sensations inspired a novel sensor design.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a soft gel-based artificial tongue for sensitive and rapid detection of pungent compounds.
• To mimic human tongue-like performance in sensing spicy tastes.
• To enable quantitative assessment of pungency in various food products.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of a flexible chemiresistive sensor using a soft gel material.
• Investigation of the sensor's response to pungent compounds, focusing on conductivity changes.
• Calibration of the sensor for a wide range of pungent compound concentrations.
• Testing the sensor's performance with diverse spicy foods and condiments.

Main Results:

• The artificial tongue demonstrated detection of pungent compounds over a wide concentration range (0.0001-1 wt %).
• High sensitivity (0.259 wt %^-1) and rapid response times (<10 s) were achieved.
• The sensor successfully quantified pungency levels in various spicy foods and condiments via ionic current measurements.

Conclusions:

• The developed soft gel-based artificial tongue offers a promising platform for pungency detection.
• This technology can enable accurate spicy taste estimation and monitoring.
• Potential applications include humanoid robots and portable spicy food analysis devices.