Electronic noses and electronic tongues for the agricultural purposes

Agricultural sector plays a key role in the economy of any country due to rapidly increasing food demand. In recent years, among emerging novel trends in agriculture, multisensor systems called electronic nose (EN) and electronic tongue (ET) have attracted much interest because they could be considered as potential alternatives or supplements to widely used analytical methods. Thanks to their design such devices are capable of examining samples without separation and identification of individual compounds, but through generating their unique so-called fingerprints, that are further processed and encoded thanks to various chemometric methods. This paper summarizes the achievements in the field of the applications of EN and ET systems to agricultural purposes during last 15 years – it discusses implementation of these devices to soil and water analysis, detection of pest and pesticides/fungicides residues, monitoring of food storage and transport conditions, as well as diseases diagnosis.