Now, robots to detect smelly feet and stinky breath

Tokyo: Japanese researchers have developed two new robots that can warn people if they suffer from bad body odour or stinky breath.

The robots make snarky remarks and exaggerated reactions to encourage offenders to do something about their odour.

One of the robots resembles a woman's head and ranks the operator's breath, declaring an "emergency" if it falls into the worst category.

Robot maker CrazyLabo and the Kitakyushu National College of Technology created a female humanoid and a dog robot that sniff a person's breath and feet, 'The Asahi Shimbun' newspaper reported.

The female robot, Kaori-chan, has brown hair and blue eyes. When a person breathes in her face, she analyses and quantifies components in their breath, and evaluates the smell on a scale of one to four.

If their breath smells good, Kaori-chan says, "It smells like citrus!"

The stinkier the breath, the harsher are Kaori-chan's remarks, ranging from, "Yuck! You have bad breath!" to "No way! I can't stand it!"

When Kaori-chan judges someone's breath is in the worst category she shouts, "Emergency! There's an emergency taking place! That's beyond the limit of patience!"

The dog robot, Shuntaro-kun, can assess the smell of a person's feet. With Beethoven's "Symphony No 5" as background music.

Shuntaro-kun sniffs the user's feet and bobs his head and nestles up next to the person or barks or falls down and growls, according to the level of the odour. If Shuntaro-kun passes out, you know you really have smelly feet.

In order to evaluate the odours, CrazyLabo draws on a commercially available odour sensor that can monitor and quantify various airborne odorous components.

Shuntaro-kun can identify the type of the odour and assess its strength. It quantifies them and sends the data to an embedded computer. Kaori-chan can also quantify the strength of two odour components to judge levels of smell.

The company is also developing a new robot whose nose grows longer like Pinocchio when people tell lies. According to CrazyLabo, the new android monitors their brain waves to detect a lie.