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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

Someone once said that dog's noses are the closest thing we have to Star Trek tricorders. In Star Trek a tricorder is a handheld sensor that can seemingly detect anything in any situation, and as a Star Trek fan this description has always stuck with me.

Perhaps one day we'll master electronic noses, but until then, dogs seem under utilized. If anyone's looking for a high difficulty, high impact way of changing the world, look at electronic noses.

Human smell is also under utilized. I had a friend with a severe peanut allergy who could enter a house and immediately tell if there were peanuts in the house. Presumably most people possess such senses, but have no reason to use them.

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It's kind of strange that the first sensor that evolution built is the last sensor to be implemented in electronics (if ever).

Chemistry and electronics are difficult bedfellows. The other senses can be emulated quite nicely in pure electronics

Also, a lot of times we may not even know what to look for.

The woman who could smell Parkinson's inspired a new path of diagnosis research: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/8202745...

interesting to think about the amount of 'information' that is present in an environment (like smells) that we aren't privy too and don't understand. Its easy to assume it doesn't exist and then be surprised when a trained dog knows someone is sick immediately.

The information (in the form of chemicals etc) is there we just can't sense it via machine or otherwise, puts the idea of technological superiority into perspective.

I'd imagine single-purpose electronic noses would be a much more tractable problem than general purpose ones.

GCMS could be argued to be a generable purpose 'electronic nose' in many ways, but just isn't portable enough to throw on a smartphone.

> I'd imagine single-purpose electronic noses would be a much more tractable problem than general purpose ones.

We already have those, to a very limited extent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_detector

A 'mass spectrometer' might be fairly close to a technological nose. I've not seen many of them though, so I imagine they're rather inefficient compared to noses.

But even if they are accurate and sensitive, how can we avoid the bias of humans? The one link I see repeated on Reddit (drugs) is a paper that iirc showed over 50% were human alerts

https://health.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/2010-2011/02/201...

My aunt has a seeing eye dog that has led her in to traffic 0 times. My dogs reliably find game birds and ignore non-game birds in the same cover. The trick is to not put them into situation where pleasing their handler is at odds with the job they are tasked with.

I think the primary issue with drug sniffing dogs is that the handlers aren’t inclined to care about the veracity of the result and would probably prefer the dog to trigger a positive result because it gives them a free pass on probable cause. The dog is likely rewarded regardless as well which is why you get high profile cases of dogs that alert 90+% of the time. They were literally trained to do it.

The same thing can’t necessarily be said for cancer detection. There isn’t a strong motivation to skew the results by the handlers and presumably any positive response would entail further diagnostic testing. I suppose cynically you could apply the same logic so that medical providers can justify the use of more expensive diagnostic testing but I’d like to think it’s not quite that bad.

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