This is a Test

An at-home smell test could pave the way for early detection of Alzheimer's disease

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-home-pave-early-alzheimer-disease.html

What's wrong with UPSIT or Sniffin' Sticks?

"Forced-choice measures", that's what; they don't allow enough measurement of the higher order executive functioning that's so hideously complex in its relation to the deep limbic system.

Recall Bloom's Taxonomy as a scale of cognitive effort, where memorization is the easiest, using the least amount of cognitive power, and then goes up through comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation.

Their new test is called the AROMHA Brain Health Test (ABHT), and it's actually a bunch of tests combined:

• Odor percept identification (OPID) test - participants smell an odor, answer a question, and then choose from four provided odor names (this sounds like the basic UPSIT, which is an odor identification test, and uses multiple choice instead of open-ended)
• Percept of odor episodic memory (POEM) test - participants distinguish between new odors and those presented earlier (so this is a memory test)
• Odor discrimination (OD) test - participants identify pairs of smells as either the same or different (also called a pairwise similarity test)
• ***This is new*** a meta-cognition measure embedded in the odor percept identification tasks, where participants sample the odor and then choose an odor name from a forced choice list of 4 options, but are then asked to evaluate their confidence: “I Guessed,” “I Narrowed Down to Three,” “I Narrowed Down to Two,” or “I Am Certain.”

via Laboratory of Olfactory Neurotranslation at McCance Center for Brain Health, and Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital: Benoît Jobin et al, The AROMHA brain health test is a remote olfactory assessment to screen for cognitive impairment, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-92826-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-92826-8

Partially unrelated image credit: AdobStockWassertest - Fraunhofer IGB - 2025

Body Odor Perceptronics

We have a winner - this article has a year's worth of stuff to look into. 

An aromatic lexicon: Comprehensive fragrance database offers insights into human perception of odors

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-02-aromatic-lexicon-comprehensive-fragrance-database.html

University of Jena and Technical University of Dresden's Olfactorial Perceptronics Fundamental Odor Database - The project brings together various research disciplines: psychology, physics, chemistry, materials science, and medicine. For the database, they had more than 1,200 test subjects smell 74 monomolecular odor samples, then describe what they perceived with their nose in their own words and also used a rating scale to assess, among other things, how pleasant or intense they found the respective odor. 

Paywalled results https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-04644-2

Public-access app (German language only) https://crown-dataset.streamlit.app/

University of Jena and colleagues from Finland, Israel and the Czech Republic Smart Electronic Olfaction for Body Odor Diagnostics or SMELLODI - The researchers asked 2,600 test subjects in 17 countries how they would describe the odor of individual parts of the body and how it differs when a person is ill or has been exercising. This resulted in a catalogue of descriptions for various odors in 13 languages, which produces clear overlaps and thus allows general statements to be made about how certain areas of the body smell. The test subjects perceived armpit odor as sweaty, sour and stinky, they described bad breath as either fresh or stinky and foot odor as cheesy.

Paywalled results https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-04630-8

Public-access app https://bow-descriptors.streamlit.app/

Here's a sample of the Standardized Lexicon of Body Odor Words, in English:

• "healthy" - fresh, clean, neutral, sweet, natural
• "after exercise" - sweaty, strong, salty, sour, musky, ... wet,
• "from the mouth" - food, rotten, minty, sour, foul, gross, garlicky, fresh, strong, 
• "from the feet" - sweaty, sour, cheesy, stinky, pungent, strong, dirty, smelly, bad
• "from the female genitals" - fishy, sour, sweet, musky, ... metallic, ... salty, 
• "from the male genitals" - sweaty, musky, salty, musty, sour, cheesy, stale, urine, ... fishy, 
• "stressed" - sweaty, sour, strong, pungent, stinky, sharp, salty, 
• "from the armpit" - sweaty, strong, sour, musky, salty, sweet, ...

via University of Jena and TU Dresden: Antonie Louise Bierling et al, A dataset of laymen olfactory perception for 74 mono-molecular odors, Scientific Data (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41597-025-04644-2

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04644-2

Also: Antonie L. Bierling et al, A standardized lexicon of body odor words crafted from 17 countries, Scientific Data (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41597-025-04630-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04630-8

Mostly unrelated image credit: AI Art - The Great Pheromone Distributor - Damien Hirst's Pharmacy 1992 - 2024

Ontogenetics and Olfaction

To help AIs understand the world, researchers put them in a robot

Feb 2025, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/to-help-ais-understand-the-world-researchers-put-them-in-a-robot/

“The inspiration for our model came from developmental psychology. We tried to emulate how infants learn and develop language”

Researchers also tried teaching an AI using a video feed from a GoPro strapped to a human baby. The problem is babies do way more than just associate items with words when they learn. They touch everything - grasp things, manipulate them, throw stuff around, and this way, they learn to think and plan their actions in language. An abstract AI model couldn’t do any of that, so Vijayaraghavan’s team gave one an embodied experience - their AI was trained in an actual robot that could interact with the world.

(The writeup for this article by Jacek Krywko for Ars Technica is very good.)

This is the idea, but instead of just an RGB camera, we need proprioception and the emotions that go along with it, and we'll have artificial smelling entities. 

via Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology: Science Robotics, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adp0751

https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.adp0751

Image credit: AI Art - Eye Mouth Tech - 2025