Freshly baked bread, a seaside pine forest or flowers in your grandparents’ garden: aromas are a unique experience enriching our lives. This is the idea at the heart of Latvian company Scent Tech (formerly Murins Startups) which aims to bring a revolutionary product to the market: a mobile aroma recording device called Scent Camera. Sandris Mūriņš, inventor and founder of the company, hopes that this devise will not only let people store important memories in the form of a scent to reproduce later, but will in future also open the door to creating a unique global database of scents
Scent Camera is an easily portable device, which, thanks to a mobile application, will be available to individual users, as well as organisations, such as museums. Sandris Mūriņš notes that not only does the device have commercial potential, it also has a farther reaching goal – to create a database of various important scents for preserving world heritage. This goal takes on special significance in the face of the impact of climate change on our planet and its nature.
Scent Tech has collaborated with leading research institutes in the development of this innovative product. The solutions that the device is based on have been created together with Riga Technical University, the University of Latvia and other European universities. For example, the chemical substance for preserving scents was created in collaboration with the University of Portu in Portugal, while the Norwegian University of Science and Technology helped develop the software for reproducing scents.
State support instruments, and especially innovation vouchers, have played a crucial role in the development of the product. The first voucher was used for preliminary research to determine whether recording and storing of scents was technologically possible. Afterwards, several other vouchers were used for securing industrial property rights, design services and elaborating a prototype device.
According to S. Mūriņš, the innovation vouchers have been a pivotal support tool in the research and product development phase, and currently the company is actively working on improvements to the prototype.
