- The Fingerspan
Finger span - Improve odor intensity measurments
The Fingerspan option is designed to improve the odor intensity generation not only intra panelist but inter panelists as well.
The intensity generated is proportional to the distance between the thumb and another finger and is sent to the GC data system.
This option is installed directly to the remote hand controller of the SNIFFER 9000 and requires the Software option to be able to use the dynamic adjustment of intensity. The dynamic ajdustment of intensity allows the user to adjust the fullscale of the intensity marker to his personal distance between thumb and major or index finger. This way, even with different panelists, the intensity range remains constant.
Odor Intensity Evaluation in Gas Chromatography-Olfactometry by
Finger Span Method
This paper describes the potential of evaluating odor intensities in a gas chromatographic effluent by cross-modality matching with the finger span (GC-O-FSCM). A simple prototype is described that allows the precise measurement and acquisition of the distance between the thumb and another finger during the analysis. The stimulation of panelists at the sniffing port with ethyl butyrate
shows a log-log relation between peak height values obtained from finger span and stimulus concentrations. It also shows that all panelists are able to perform this task but with different precision, which is used to select them. A triplicate evaluation by GC-O-FSCM of the intensity of flavor constituents in synthetic solutions shows that a four-member panel is perfectly able to determine most of the characteristics of the solutions and to create a finger span multidimensional space highly correlated with the theoretical intensity space.
The full paper can be downloaded here (see downloads on right hand side)
