RootSense

Mission: Our mission is to digitize the human sense of smell into actionable intelligence, enabling earlier detection of disease, safer environments, and a smarter, healthier future.

Purpose: The purpose of RootSense is to make odor—one of our most fundamental human senses—interpretable and actionable in the same way we have done for sight and sound. Today, while we have built powerful systems to process visual and audio data, smell remains completely absent from the digital world. As a result, we lack the ability to systematically analyze odor data and extract meaningful insights that could improve health, safety, and quality of life. Smell is often the earliest indicator of critical events. The presence of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can signal early-stage disease, toxic air conditions, mold growth, gas leaks, or food spoilage—often before these issues are visible or measurable through traditional means. Despite this, there is currently no scalable, real-time infrastructure that can continuously monitor and interpret odor data in everyday environments. RootSense addresses this gap by creating a network of compact, connected sensors—approximately the size of a smoke detector—that can be deployed in homes, hospitals, restaurants, and commercial buildings. These devices utilize a hybrid array of metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) sensors and advanced nanomaterial-based sensors, such as graphene or carbon nanotube FET sensors, to detect a wide range of VOCs with high sensitivity and pattern diversity. By combining these complementary sensing technologies, the system captures rich, multidimensional odor signatures and converts them into structured data. Through advanced machine learning models, this data is transformed into actionable insights, such as early detection of disease biomarkers in breath, identification of indoor air hazards, and prediction of food contamination or spoilage. Beyond individual devices, the true necessity of RootSense lies in its platform-level approach. Each sensor contributes to a shared, continuously evolving dataset of odor patterns and outcomes. Over time, this enables the system to improve its predictive accuracy by learning from a diverse range of environments and conditions. This approach mirrors the success of data-driven platforms in other industries. For example, one of the most influential American companies, Tesla, has demonstrated that continuous data collection and shared learning across devices can create a powerful feedback loop, leading to rapid and sustained improvements in performance. RootSense applies this same principle to olfaction. By transforming smell into a measurable, shareable, and continuously improving data stream—while maintaining strict user privacy and control—we enable a new layer of intelligence for the physical world. This intelligence layer has the potential to prevent disease, reduce environmental risks, minimize food waste, and create safer, healthier spaces. In an increasingly data-driven society, the absence of smell from our digital infrastructure represents a critical blind spot. RootSense exists to close that gap, turning one of humanity’s most important senses into one of its most powerful new sources of insight. The United States built the internet, which digitized the world—now it is time to digitize scent.