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Restoring smell with an electronic nose

Development of an olfactory implant that could tackle anosmia is in its early stages.
  1. Simon Makin

    1. Simon Makin is a freelance writer in Reading, UK.

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Cartoon of swirls of smells flow from a meal to a computer screen where they are viewed as charts by a researcher

Image: Sam Falconer

One of the many aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic that has taken the world by surprise is the vast swathes of people who lost their sense of smell. For most people who get COVID-19, the loss of smell is brief, but some do not regain their sense of smell for 6 months or longer1. “There’s going to be a whole cohort of individuals who aren’t going to recover, looking for some help,” says Richard Costanzo, a physiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond.

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Nature 606, S12-S13 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01630-1

This article is part of Nature Outlook: Smell, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content.

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