The Nose Knows: Bionics Restoring Smell
From the lingering scent of coffee to a freshly mowed lawn, our sense of smell is something often taken for granted – until it’s gone!
This is a temporary or permanent issue of concern for many people with the commonly reported COVID-19 symptom of a lost ability to smell. Thankfully, biomedical researchers globally are now taking an interest in the olfactory system to shed new light on how bionic technology can help to restore a sense of smell.
Professor Thomas Hummel from the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany recently sat down with Nature’s “Tales from the Synapse” podcast to give his take on the future of such treatments.
Likening the process to cochlear implants used by those with hearing loss, Professor Hummel said research into how bionic technology could help patients with lost sense of smell was well underway.
“There could be similar implants inside the nasal cavity connected to the olfactory bulb, eliciting a pattern that might make sense to the brain,” said Professor Hummel.
The Bionic Nose
One such example of this technology is a “bionic nose”, or sense of smell system currently being developed by a team in the United States.
This idea was born well before the COVID-19 pandemic, but one that could help millions of people worldwide hampered by a lost sense of smell – as told to The Washington Post.
The brainchild of two researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, the bionic solution bypasses damaged olfactory cells using microelectronics, and stimulates the brain directly with implanted electrodes.
An external sensor picks up odour signals and sends them to a microprocessor chip – both of which are attached to eyeglasses. Amazingly, this process creates unique codes for different smells, which are then relayed to a receiver implanted in the skull.
An early prototype of the ‘bionic nose system’ has been tested in rodent trials, showing olfactory brain cells could be activated even when bypassing cut or damaged olfactory nerves. Studies are now underway to map the areas of the human brain that could trigger smell perceptions when stimulated.
“Figuring out how odour is perceived from brain activity is a complex decoding problem… but there may be multiple ways to re-create important aspects of smell for people with anosmia [lost sense of smell],” study co-researcher, Mark Richardson told The Washington Post.
Listen to the “Tales from the Synapse” episode in conversation with Professor Hummel here, and read more about the bionic nose via The Washington Post.
