What’s Cooking? Olfactory Sensing Using Off-the-Shelf Components

We present Project Sniff, a hardware and software exploration into olfactory sensing with an application in digital communication and social presence. Our initial results indicate that a simple hardware design using off-the-shelf sensors and the application of supervised learning to the sensor data allows us to detect several common household scents reliably. As part of this exploration, we developed a scent-sensing IoT prototype and placed it in the kitchen area to sense “what’s cooking?”, and share the olfactory information via a Slack bot. We conclude by outlining our plans for future steps and potential applications of this research.