Or as first author and graduate research fellow Sarah Sniffen puts it: How do odors come to acquire some sort of emotional charge?

In many ways, our world capitalizes upon the importance of smells to influence emotions, running the gamut from perfumes to cooking and even grocery store design.

“Odors are powerful at driving emotions, and it’s long been thought that the sense of smell is just as powerful, if not more powerful, at driving an emotional response as a picture, a song or any other sensory stimulus,” said senior author Dan Wesson, Ph.D., a professor of pharmacology and therapeutics in the UF College of Medicine and interim director of the Florida Chemical Senses Institute.

With its proprietary neural interface based on nearly a decade of primary research, Canaery can detect every scent that enters the natural olfactory system of a working animal and wirelessly transmit the chemical signatures to the cloud for processing. All of this happens in seconds, even if the animal cannot consciously identify the scent. There is no special training required and no chance of accidental handler misdirection. Canaery can even identify scents that the animal may never have encountered before.

The resulting continuous analysis can be used for early diagnosis of diseases, preventing the spread of invasive species, or identifying other scent-based signatures such as environmental hazards and explosives.