An electronic tongue for monitoring drinking waters using a fuzzy ARTMAP neural network implemented on a microcontroller

A portable electronic tongue has been developed using an array of eighteen thick-film electrodes of different materials forming a multi-electrode array. A microcontroller is used to implement the pattern recognition. The classification of drinking waters is carried out by a Microchip PIC18F4550 microcontroller and is based on a fuzzy ARTMAP neural network algorithm. This algorithm is initially trained with the multi-electrode array on a Personal Computer (PC) using several samples of waters (still, sparkling and tap) to obtain the optimum architecture with the weights and the map field of the network. Once it is trained, the computed weights and map field are programmed into the microcontroller, which then gives the water classification directly for new unknown water samples.