Dr Emanuela Maggioni

Owidgets technology demonstrates how scented puffs of air can change or influence our behaviour.

How Sussex researchers are using technology to exploit the mysterious “poet” of the senses

Salami, sundried tomatoes, herbs and mushrooms…the rich aromas of the storage room of her Italian grandparents’ house had a profound effect on Emanuela Maggioni as a child.

“I soon realised that I could not replicate the emotion I felt about their house without that unique combination of smells,” she recalls. 

Her curiosity about this complex relationship between scent and memory has led to a career exploring what is often called the “poet” of the senses.

Emanuela is a research fellow in the University of Sussex's Computer Human Interaction (SCHI) Lab, an interdisciplinary research team, led by Professor Marianna Obrist and supported by an ERC (European Research Council) starting grant.

The lab’s ambition is to create interactive technology for taste, touch and smell – the senses that tend to get overlooked when sound and vision take centre stage.

While Emanuela works with colleagues across all these senses, or ‘modalities’, her work focuses largely on how we can exploit smell for a variety of future applications; from enhancing a cinema experience, to creating scent maps for the visually impaired, to helping those with eating disorders change perceptions of their bodies through smell training.

“I am fascinated because absolutely it is one of the most powerful senses,” she says. “We communicate with other humans using biochemical signals, even if we are not aware of it, and yet out of all of the senses it is the least researched and understood.”

In fact, the human nose – far from being illiterate in comparison to other species – contains an abundance of specialised neurons that are capable of detecting an estimated 10,000 different smells. And each person’s sense of smell, or olfaction, is different.

A unique feature of this particular sense is that it bypasses the thalamus (the ‘grey matter’ part of the brain that interprets information from our other senses) and has a direct pathway to the primordial (ancient)  limbic system of the brain, where emotion and long-term memory are processed.

This explains why we instantly like or dislike a smell without having to think about it.

It is also why our first exposure to a smell can create a specific memory, famously known as The Proust Effect after the French writer Marcel Proust described a character in his novel À La Recherche du Temps Perdu vividly recalling moments from his childhood when eating a tea-soaked madeleine cake.

The challenge for Emanuela and her colleagues has been in creating technology that both captures and simplifies the complexity of olfaction.

With the support of an ERC proof-of-concept award, the team has designed a software toolkit, called Olfactory Widgets,or OWidgets for short, which they are now testing in a variety of contexts.

The toolkit includes a device that delivers short bursts of compressurised air scented with essential oils that have been selected for the effect they have on a general population (for example, lavender can slow the heartrate and induce a feeling of calm, while the scent of lemon is arousing).

The device is linked to a computer controlled by the OWidgets toolkit that triggers the emission of a scent at a particular time and for a measured duration.

"Smell nav"

One of the applications for OWidgets currently being explored is a form of “smell nav” for motorists, which is also linked to an ongoing PhD project in the SCHI Lab by Dmitrijs Dmitrenko.

“When you are driving you are busy with your vision and your hearing, but the sense of smell is subliminal,” says Emanuela. “You can perceive a smell even when you are not aware of it, and that is because it is working even under the threshold of perception.

“So I can trigger a smell to alert you that you are exceeding the speed limit, or that you are tired. In the future we can move from these essential oils to more sophisticated compounds. The device could enhance satnav to let you know when you are approaching a coffee shop, or direct you to a point of interest.”

Another practical application is an alert system for messages and notifications for computer users – programmed so that certain smells signify particular people, or the level of urgency of the message. The lab’s latest work on using smell as notification modality was accepted for publication at the ICMI’18 conference. 

immersive

And while sensorama has been tried before to create an immersive cinematic experience, OWidgets can deliver a more refined mapping of what’s happening on the screen. In much the same way that a soundtrack matches moments of excitement or tension, so certain smells known to elicit feelings of calmness, excitement or anxiety can be emitted at precise moments.

An already effective use of the technology is in virtual reality (VR) environments to complement the senses of sight, sound and touch, particularly when combined with therapy for those who have experienced war traumas.

Emanuela says: “People block information that’s painful, but when you are in a virtual environment and you add the smell, the impact on the emotion of the patient is higher. They will then experience and rationalise the sequences of the event.”

Smell can also be used to train the brain to think differently. In the SCHI Lab, they are exploring how particular scents can reduce perceptions of pain or body dysmorphia.

“We are seeing if we can help people to associate the smell of lemon with feeling lighter, or vanilla with feeling soft and round,” explains Emanuela.

While there are exciting possibilities for the technology, one of the greatest challenges, she adds, is in convincing others that smell is just as important as the other senses.

“We have to accept that we are just like animals, that we are influenced and driven by our sense of smell, and that if we lose it or it is damaged, then it affects our memories, our emotions, and ultimately our chances of survival.”

 * SCHI Lab http://multi-sensory.info/ @schi_labOWidgets http://owidgets.co.uk/ @o_widgets