抄録
A living body is receiving quite a lot of information from the external world through sensitive organs for life-supporting. Recently, various physical sensors which measure physical quantity have been developed rapidly. On the other hand, chemical sensors have not developed enough and they are limited to a pH meter, an ion selective electrode and an enzyme sensor. It is difficult to develop sensors for the sense of smell and taste became they have to sense various characters concurrently from chemical substances. We have been studying a possibility of taste sensing using a single artificial lipid membrane. We found that the conductance and transmittance show different characteristics in taste solutions. And we have suggested a way of the taste evaluation by showing features of electrical and optical characteristics as response patterns on a six axis radar-chart. Furthermore, applying the principal component analysis to the response patterns, we have also shown them on the two dimensional coordinate. In this study, we measured the spectrum characteristics of membrane for the purpose of discrimination in the commercial drinks and the condiments. We defined autocorrelation functions in order to evaluate the spectrum characteristics and we utilized Mahalanobis distance as a way of discriminant analysis. We selected two autocorrelation coefficients (hereafter cited as ACC1 and ACC2). One is ACC1 which was put as the value of x-axis and the other is ACC2 which was put as the value of y-axis. We had plots represented from the two ACCs on the two dimensional coordinate. We had known groups obtained by some sample plots. Mahalanobis distances were measured between those plots and the center of gravities of the known groups. As a result, the commercial drinks and the condiments were classified correctly in each category. Therefore, this method was effective to classify category among the commercial drinks and the condiments.
