+a personal olfactory device designed specifically for someone with impaired or degraded smell — in this case for dad. the motivation is personal: someone who has lost or reduced their ability to smell food and environments is cut off from a major dimension of experience and safety (can't smell smoke, gas leaks, spoiled food). existing solutions are medical and expensive; consumer options barely exist.

+

+the device would do one or more of the following: amplify weak olfactory signals, classify smells and present them in an alternate modality (audio or haptic feedback describing what's present), or compensate for missing sensory input through a kind of olfactory prosthetic. the electronic nose direction (enose) is the most technically tractable — existing sensor arrays can classify a range of common smells, and paired with a lightweight haptic or audio output, could give someone back meaningful information about their environment even if they can't perceive the raw smell.

+

+this is closely related to [[smell-resetter|smell resetter]] which explored olfactory mechanisms in depth (though that was about fatigue rather than loss), and to [[sensor-capturer|sensor capturer]] which covers building sensor hardware for unusual modalities. the [[ppg-biomarker-wearable|PPG biomarker wearable]] project is a parallel hardware/biomarker direction. technically, this would sit at the intersection of embedded ML (for smell classification), sensor hardware, and wearable design — similar skill set to [[acoustic-drone-detection|acoustic drone detection]] which uses sensor arrays for scene classification.