OWidget Update by Christopher Dawes

Dear Fifth Sense members,

At OWidgets, our ambition is to develop accurate, efficient, and affordable smell technology. However, this vision would not be possible without the help of the smell loss community. In September, OWidgets asked members of Fifth Sense and the wider public to help evaluate the future of digital smell health as part of a lab-based study. This study asked members to try out our digital smell training prototype (physical smell-delivery device and SmellHealth App on a smartphone) and share their experience with it. We were inundated with responses from members and filled out our 20-person study within a day. From these lessons, we are currently designing a second version of our prototype based on the feedback and will aim to run one more study in November. We will again ask for the help of members to provide further feedback to further improve this digital solution, which we hope to provide to selected households in a 6-months deployment next year.

We are delighted to have around 60 individuals sign up to be alerted for future smell health studies. On a personal level, it has also been very uplifting to meet members of the community, to hear their stories, and to be told the ambition OWidgets and UCL are aiming to achieve is perceived as meaningful to them.

User-centred design is a core part of our company and our collaboration with UCL. As a result, we will be sending the 20 people who took part in the study the lessons we learned from their help.

If you would like to be part of our email list for smell-related studies, please drop Chris an email (c.dawes@ucl.ac.uk).

We look forward to hopefully meeting 20 more members in November 2022.

Thank you again for all your help and interest,

Christopher Dawes on behalf of the OWidgets team and University College London (UCL) Meet the team: https://www.ow-smelldigital.com/about