Electronic Tongue! New Way to Taste

Now you not need to wait in front of the market to taste the different varieties of fruits and other eatables. Its all the newly developed 'Electronic Tongue' will do it for you.
Researchers at the Center for Molecular Recognition and Technological Development (IDM) and the CUINA group of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV) in Spain have developed a new electronic tongue system that analyzes the antioxidant powers of juices, fruit and fruit purees.


Electronic tongues, using electrochemical techniques, help us to sort food samples in situ and to quantify their physio chemical parameters, in a fast and economical way," said Ramon Martinez Mañez in a news release from AlphaGalileo. Mañez is a researcher at the UPV and IDM.



The Working:
A computer compares scans of the array of dots before and after the paper is wetted with an eyedropper full of liquid. After running dozens of samples of mystery artificial sweeteners dissolved in water or tea, the research team reported that their tongue could pick out the sweetener used with with 100 percent accuracy.

But the array only works collectively: No single dot—each made of a tiny gel coated with a pigment that reacts to different sweeteners.


Main Application:
 Electronic Tongue can be used for food analysis, analysis of liquid food, beverages and brews, analysis of homogenates (flesh food, fruits, vegetables), analysis of vegetable and olive oils. Raw materials, intermediates, final products, taste substances, food additives.


It will Recognise, identify and classify the quality of different items. And it will do multicomponent quantitative determination of the content of inorganic and organic nutrients.


It has applications in so many other areas such as,


 Identification of basic tastes  viz. salty, sweet, bitter, sour, umami. And in Clinical analysis, it would recognise and analyse the multicomponent quantitative of inorganic and organic substances in biological and medical liquids. 


The other areas included are,

• Diagnostic of diseases through the integral chemical analysis of liquid media.
• Analysis of pollutants in the ground water.
• Determination of toxic free ions in the seawater.
• Control of composition of flue gas (absorbed by the liquid) from incinerators.
• Determination of heavy metal content in a fluid of an industrial waste purification system.
• Analysis of Cu, Zn, Fe, Cr and other components in the galvanic industry.