Development of Chemical Sensing System for Quantifying Deliciousness

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The human taste sensation "deliciousness" is affected by various factors, texture, color, temperature, etc. Various physical sensor can quantify texture or color. But no chemical sensor has been able to quantify taste or odor senses so far.In this study, we tried to measure "deliciousness" using multichannel taste sensor. A multichannel taste sensor is composed of several kind of lipid/polimer membranes for transforming information about taste substances into electric signals. Responses of the lipid membranes to various kinds of taste substances were investigated by measuring changes of membrane potentialsA multichannel taste sensor was applied to milk by focusing on the taste variance caused by heat treatment, homogenization treatment and fatty component. It was pointed out that these factors considerably affect the deliciousness of milk. The sensor output showed high correlations with richness and the degree of protein denaturation. As for the homogenization treatment, the sensor showed higher discrimination ability than humans. The fatty component of several kinds of milk was also measured using the taste sensor. These results imply that study of quantification of deliciousness of foodstuffs was successfully made using the multichannel taste sensor.