Methods for Biometric Identification of Human Body Scent

Orna Barash, NanoScent, Misgav, Israel (orna@nanoscentlabs.com)

The Human body consists of billions of microbes which resides on the skin and comprise the skin flora. Different glands which are spread over the skin provide nurturing environment to the skin microbes. In return these microbes release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to the proximate environment surrounding the human body as part of their metabolism processes providing it with distinctive smelling shadow. The skin microbial pattern varies among people depending on their gender, age, ethnicity and lifestyle, and thus may serve as potential biometric fingerprint.  Moreover, since the skin is the largest human organ, accounting for approximately 12–15% of body weight, it plays a major role in determine the individual body scent

NanoScent, which is Misgav based StartUp, believes that by utilizing nanotechnology alongside analytical chemistry it could create biometric fingerprint based on human body scent for various applications, such as health, nutrition and security. NanoScent technology consists of volatile organic compounds sensor, scent reader and scent recognition software. The sensors utilize coated nanoparticles chemical resistors which change their electrical signal once exposed to scent. The scent reader hosts the sensor and is responsible for performing the ‘sniffing’ operation exposing the sensors to VOCs yielding electrical signals of the sensors array which represents the scent fingerprint. Using tagged data and machine learning algorithms the scent is recorded and analyzed in the cloud.

            I will be presenting here different methods for absorbing and analyzing the human body scent and different trials we have performed using our scent recognition platform.