Electronic nose for evaluation of banana ripeness monitoring

Abstract—Food security remains a global challenge, with postharvest losses and food waste identified as major contributors to the issue. One of the underlying problems is the inability to consistently evaluate fruit quality using existing methods. Conventional approaches such as human graders, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and image recognition are often limited by high cost, destructive testing, or inconsistent accuracy. This creates the need for a more practical and reliable solution. Electronic nose (e-nose) systems have emerged as a promising technology for food and fruit quality assessment due to their rapid analysis, repeatability, low cost, and high efficiency. This paper presents a design and development of e-nose system for fruit ripeness evaluation. The proposed system analyses volatile organic compounds (VOC) emitted from fruit samples to determine their maturity stage. The sensing unit consists of eight metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) sensors, while data acquisition is performed using an Arduino microcontroller. Experimental evaluation was conducted using Cavendish bananas. The developed system successfully classified the fruits into unripe, ripe, and overripe categories with 100% accuracy on test samples. The results demonstrate that the e-nose system can provide consistent and repeatable measurements for ripeness evaluation.