A potentiometric electronic tongue to monitor meat freshness

This paper describes the development of an electronic tongue system for monitoring the freshness of meat. The analysis was made along 14 days on a whole piece of pork loin stored under refrigeration. The electronic tongue system is made by an array of potentiometric electrodes. Through the use of various multivariate analysis techniques, such as PCA and two types of artificial neural networks (i.e. multilayer perceptron (MLP) and fuzzy ARTMAP) it was found that it is possible to determine the time elapsed in relation to the degradation of the loin by using simple potentiometric measurements. These results suggest that this simple, or a similar electronic tongue, could be useful for the undemanding qualitative or semi-quantitative evaluation of freshness in meat samples in a wide range of situations.