This paper presents a new taste interface for multisensory communication called "Thermal Sweet Taste Machine". We developed this interface in order to create sweet sensations, by manipulating the temperature on the tongue, without using chemicals. This device device changes the temperature on the surface of the tongue (from 20°C to 40°C) within a short period of time using a computer controlled circuit. Our preliminary user studies suggested that this device would be effective in two ways; producing the sweet sensations without the aid of chemicals, and enhancing the sweetness of the food and drinks. Here we discuss our concept, development of the interface, and some preliminary studies that has been carried out. We believe our technology would enhance the experiences and capabilities in future multisensory communication in different disciplines such as Human-Computer Interaction, human robot interactions, gaming and interacting with artificial agents

Cheok, A. D.

Johari, N.

Karunanayaka, K.

Samshir, N. A.

City Research Online

              City, University of London Institutional RepositoryCitation: Samshir, N. A., Johari, N., Karunanayaka, K. & Cheok, A. D. (2016). Thermal Sweet Taste Machine for Multisensory Internet. In: HAI 2016 - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction. (pp. 325-328). ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4508-8 This is the accepted version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link:  http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/19500/Link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2974804.2980503Copyright and reuse: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to.City Research Online:            http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/            publications@city.ac.ukCity Research OnlineThermal Sweet Taste Machine for Multisensory InternetNur Amira Samshir, Nurafiqah Johari, Kasun Karunanayaka, Adrian David CheokImagineering InstituteIskandar Puteri, Malaysia{amira, nurafiqah, kasun, adrian}@imagineeringinstitute.orgABSTRACTThis paper presents a new taste interface for multisensorycommunication called “Thermal Sweet Taste Machine”. Wedeveloped this interface in order to create sweet sensations,by manipulating the temperature on the tongue, without usingchemicals. This device device changes the temperature on thesurface of the tongue (from 20°C to 40°C) within a short periodof time using a computer controlled circuit. Our preliminaryuser studies suggested that this device would be effective intwo ways; producing the sweet sensations without the aid ofchemicals, and enhancing the sweetness of the food and drinks.Here we discuss our concept, development of the interface,and some preliminary studies that has been carried out. Webelieve our technology would enhance the experiences andcapabilities in future multisensory communication in differentdisciplines such as Human-Computer Interaction, human robotinteractions, gaming and interacting with artificial agents.ACM Classification KeywordsH.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI):Miscellaneous; See http://acm.org/about/class/1998/ for thefull list of ACM classifiers. This section is required.Author KeywordsThermal Sweet Taste Machine; Multisensory Communication;Digital Taste; HCI; TRPM5.INTRODUCTIONThe five most fundamental tastes are sweet, sour, bitter, saltyand umami (savory). Probably sweet taste is the most pleasantout of all the basic tastes [2]. Considering about the mul-tisensory communication, sensing and actuating sweet tastedigitally is an extremely important requirement. Once wereached that goal, people will be able to experience the sweet-ness digitally through the internet (as illustrated in Figure 1)like we experience text, audio and visuals in our daily life.The early sweet taste taste interfaces developed in the fieldof Human-Computer Interaction primarily used chemicals togenerate sweet sensations [4, 5, 10]. However, some previousstudies suggested that by rising the temperature on the tonguewithin few seconds resulted sweet sensations without chemi-cals [3] and enhance the sensitivity for sweetness [9]. UsingPermission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citationon the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored.For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).HAI ’16 October 04-07, 2016, Biopolis, Singapore© 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-4508-8/16/10.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2974804.2980503Figure 1. Concept image of people that are able to communicate andexperience sensations digitallythis concept, we have developed a computer controllable userinterface that can change the temperature of the surface ofthe tongue rapidly within safe margins and produce sweetsensations without using chemicals.RELATED WORKSThe “Thermal stimulation of taste” [3] experiment has firstshowed that heating the tip of the tongue from a cold tempera-ture resulted phantom sweet taste sensations. The temperaturelimits used for the experiment was from 20°C to 35°C andvaried at approximately at 1.5°C/s using a Peltier module. Thisresearch has discussed the concept of ’Thermal Tasters’, thekind of people who can perceive different tastes by stimulatingtheir tongue with temperature.According to the study conducted by Talavera et al. [9], in-creasing the temperature resulted in activation of TRPM 5channel (which triggers for sweet, umami and bitter tastes)that generates a depolarizing potential in the taste receptorcells. This effect causes both the enhancement of sweetnessperception at high temperatures and the ‘thermal taste’ (thephenomenon whereby heating or cooling of the tongue evokesensations of taste in the absence of chemical tastants).As above mentioned papers, in medicine and neurosciencefields, the thermal effect with TRPM 5 channel has well stud-ied and discussed. However, in HCI, still there is no userinterface that can effectively reproduce sweet sensations ontongue digitally. The “Digitally Stimulating the Sensation ofTaste Through Electrical and Thermal Stimulation” [6] pre-sented a system that is able to stimulate taste sensations onhuman tongue. By changing the temperature and inverted cur-rent, some participants reported that they were able to perceptsweetness. However, this technology has never developed asa sweet interface although the author and other researchersin the field has developed digital interfaces that are able toproduce sour and salty tastes more robustly [1, 7]. “AffectingTumbler” [8] is an another interface that can affect humanperceive of different flavor, without changing the food anddrinks ingredients itself. The study is done by applying ther-mal sensations (heating up) to the skin around the nose whiledrinking. Based on the user study, it is suggested that theflavor perception is improved after applying thermal to thenasal skin.Results of the previous studies suggest that still there aremany studies left to be done in this research area to build arobust, controllable and repeatable sweet interface (e.g. findthe suitable parameters such as temperature levels, intensity,speed, user experience studies such as compare organic anddigital tastes, and study short term and long term effects).METHODDuring the development of the proposed device we were pri-marily focused on heating up the surface of the tongue andstimulate the heat receptors with in a short time period. Theoperating temperature of the device is limited from of 20°Cto 40°. Typically, the body temperature of a human is ap-proximately 36.5°C. Therefore, in terms of the operating tem-perature range, this interface can be considered as safe to beapplied with humans. The latest prototype of the thermal sweettaste machine is shown in the Figure 2. Thermal Sweet Tastemachine consists of an electronic controller circuit, Electrodethat connects to the Peltier, and a software module. Figure 3shows the the design of the circuit. Temperature of the tongueis adjusted by the Peltier attached with a silver strip (tongueinterface).Peltier module is a special kind of semiconductorwhereby one side becomes cool and other side become hotwhen current flows through it. This Peltier has operating tem-perature in between -40°C to 80°C and consumes up to 8.5A.Therefore, high power motor driver is used to drive high cur-rent Peltier module up to 10A continuously and support signmagnitude PWM operation.We used copper strips for the first prototype and silver stripin the latest version. We found that silver provides fastertemperature change as it has low specific heat capacity, whichis 0.057kcal/kg°C, 0.035kcal/kg°C lower than copper. Wedesigned the silver strip to a smaller surface area for a fasterheating and cooling process and made it as thin as possible(0.5mm thickness). Silver strip is attached using a high thermalconductivity in order to provide efficient heat transfer betweentwo surfaces. Further, silver does not provide any metallictaste sensations.By improving heating and cooling process of the peltier, fasterchange of temperature can be achieved. Therefore, a liquidcooler is attached together with the cooling side of the peltierto overcome the inconsistent heating. A series of technicalexperiments have been conducted to identify the most suitablerise time of the silver strip from 25°C to reach 40°C usinga PID controlling. The best rise time we achieved with aFigure 2. This figure shows the detailed component view of the thermalsweet taste machine second prototype .good stability was 7.25s with a PID parameter of (20,10,25).We have also modified our system to start the temperaturerise from 20°C. We have also found out three different risetimes which provide different stimulation speeds to use in userexperiments.DISCUSSIONThe preliminary studies of the Thermal Sweet Taste deviceshows quite significant results in achieving the objectives.Series of user experiments has been conducted to prove theeffectiveness of the device. During the first experiment with36 volunteers (12 females, Mage = 25.88, SD = 5.75, Agerange = 20-44) participants were asked to place the interfaceon top of their tongue and sense the temperature change andrequested to describe their experiences. Six participants feltthe sweet sensation purely from the device. These partici-pants are recognized and was asked to do the next experiment,which is based on three different speeds (the rise times for thethree speeds was 6 seconds , 10 seconds and 15 seconds) oftemperature change. We found out that the medium and fasttemperature changes produce more intense sweet sensations.The second experiment was done with 20 volunteers (5 fe-males, Mage = 25.30, SD = 5.43, Age range = 20-44) fromanother institute. We were studying the effect using the ther-mal sweet interface (two modes : device is switched ON andOFF) with two sucrose solutions and water (water, 3 g/l su-crose, and 24 g/l sucrose). As shown in the Figure 4, theresult shows that when the device is switched on it is able toenhance the intensity and sweetness of the solutions.In future, we would continue to identify more thermal tasters.With a large group of thermal tasters (at least more than 40)we will be able to run out more user experiments to improvethe Thermal Sweet Taste Machine. We are planing to identifyparameters for controlling intensity, repeatability and control-lability of sweet sensations. Also we are looking forward todevelop new prototypes which will be suitable for differentapplications such as spoons, cups, and bottles. We believe thatthis interface would be very useful in the future of multisensoryapplications for the fields like human-computer interaction,man-machine interactions, virtual reality and medicine.Figure 3. This figure shows the detailed component view of the thermal sweet taste machine second prototype.Figure 4. Experiment results for the user evaluation on enhancement of sweet tasteCONCLUSIONThis paper presented the research and development of a newuser interface which reproduce and enhance sweet sensation byapplying thermal stimulation to the surface of the tongue. Ourconcept, development of the prototype and some preliminaryuser experiment results were discussed in the above sections.In summary, by using this device, ’Thermal Tasters’ are ableto obtain the sweet sensation purely from the device and in an-other scenario, enhancement of sweet sensations was reportedwhile tasting sucrose after using the device. By carefullyimproving this technology further and finding the proper stim-ulation parameters, we will be able to digitally actuate sweetsensations meaningfully for future internet communication.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe authors would like to thank greatly and acknowledge Car-los Velasco, Olivia Petit, Michael Herrera and the other mem-bers in Imagineering Institute, Malaysia for their significantcontributions for this research. We also would like to thankProfessor Mohd Shahrizal Sunar, Dr. Farhan Mohamed andother MagicX members in University Technology Malaysiafor helping us to conduct user experiments at their premises.REFERENCES1. Yukika Aruga and Takafumi Koike. 2015. Taste changeof soup by the recreating of sourness and saltiness usingthe electrical stimulation. In Proceedings of the 6thAugmented Human International Conference. ACM,191–192.2. Gary K Beauchamp and Beverly J Cowart. 1987.Development of sweet taste. In Sweetness. Springer,127–140.3. Alberto Cruz and Barry G Green. 2000. Thermalstimulation of taste. Nature 403, 6772 (2000), 889–892.4. Philip Kortum. 2008. HCI beyond the GUI: Design forhaptic, speech, olfactory, and other nontraditionalinterfaces. Morgan Kaufmann.5. Dan Maynes-Aminzade. 2005. Edible bits: Seamlessinterfaces between people, data and food. In Conferenceon Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI’05)-Extended Abstracts. Citeseer, 2207–2210.6. Nimesha Ranasinghe. 2012. Digitally Stimulating theSensation of Taste Through Electrical and ThermalStimulation. Ph.D. Dissertation.7. Nimesha Ranasinghe, Kuan-Yi Lee, Gajan Suthokumar,and Ellen Yi-Luen Do. 2014. The sensation of taste in thefuture of immersive media. In Proceedings of the 2ndACM International Workshop on Immersive MediaExperiences. ACM, 7–12.8. Chie Suzuki, Takuji Narumi, Tomohiro Tanikawa, andMichitaka Hirose. 2014. Affecting tumbler: affecting ourflavor perception with thermal feedback. In Proceedingsof the 11th Conference on Advances in ComputerEntertainment Technology. ACM, 19.9. Karel Talavera, Keiko Yasumatsu, Thomas Voets, GuyDroogmans, Noriatsu Shigemura, Yuzo Ninomiya,Robert F Margolskee, and Bernd Nilius. 2005. Heatactivation of TRPM5 underlies thermal sensitivity ofsweet taste. Nature 438, 7070 (2005), 1022–1025.10. Mark Tutton. 2008. Designers developing virtual-reality‘Cocoon’. CNN (2008).

Thermal Sweet Taste Machine for Multisensory Internet

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Thermal Sweet Taste Machine for Multisensory Internet

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