Electronic tongue and electronic nose for food quality and safety

For the needs of food producers and consumers, electronic tongue and electronic nose play many roles for food quality and safety in food production, food supervision and daily life. The principles and progresses of electronic tongue and electronic nose were elaborated. The core hardware namely electronic tongue sensors and electronic nose sensors, and the core software namely intelligent sensory algorithms were summarized. It was found that the proportion of electronic tongue and electronic nose employed in food quality control and monitoring in production was the highest. Electronic tongue and electronic nose with the prediction accuracy of 80–96 % accounted for a large proportion in the applications of food. The superposition operation of two or more intelligent sensory algorithms has become routine. In addition, the combination of electronic tongue and electronic nose was highlighted. It was resulted that the ability of food category recognition and quality prediction of the combined technology of electronic nose and electronic tongue showed an increase of 8–25 % compared with the single technology. The future challenges and expectations of electronic tongue and electronic nose were discussed.