Giving phones a sense of smell

One of my electronic engineering courses is an evening course for students who work full-time. Many of them work for mobile phone companies or servers. So we read an article about an innovation being developed for mobile phones that seemed rather unusual.

The innovation, from Adamant Technologies, is an iPhone app that "can take the sense of smell and taste and digitize them," allowing users to determine whether they have bad breath or not, and - more importantly - can be used to detect and monitor medical problems.

The article, This Guy is Teaching Your iPhone to Detect Bad Breath ... And Other Smells from Business Insider is at:

http://www.businessinsider.com/your-iphone-will-soon-detect-bad-breath-2013-1

Another article from the website Slate, Siri, How Bad is My Breath? is at:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/01/07/adamant_technologies_wants_to_give_your_smartphone_a_sense_of_smell.html

These articles were written in January 2013, and mention the development being realized in "a year or two," but so far there is no further news from Adamant Technologies. Their website doesn't give much information, and consists only of a home page and a "Contact Us" link.

The company website: http://www.adamanttech.com/

The home page describes the innovation in this way:

"Adamant Technologies is a San Francisco based company that has developed a novel mobile chemical sensor device that allows users to track their health and fitness through chemicals in their breath. We empower users to take control of their own health and understand it through real-time, non-invasive detection."

The link to "Contact Us" says, "Adamant Technologies is looking for motivated, hardworking and high energy people to add to our team. If you're interested in being a part of the next big thing, contact us and let us know."

My students discussed what kind of engineers would be relevant for this project, and to what extent they would find it interesting to work on this technology.

For further discussions, students could also brainstorm the impact of such technology, and what it could be used for. To what extent to do they feel this could be considered "the next big thing"?