Vapor Communications Unveils oCase With New Healthcare Partnership As Company Moves To Commercially Digitize Scent In Spring 2016

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 7, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Vapor Communications, a technology startup building a software and hardware scent communication platform, announced the next phase in its effort to commercially digitize scent for consumers. Core to this latest phase of development is the oCase, a new technology that enables consumers to receive scent signals from a specially designed protective case for a tablet device or smart phone. 

The oCase is a basis of Vapor Communication's new partnership with CATCH (Center for Assessment Technology and Continuous Health), co-founded and led by Dennis Ausiello, Jackson Distinguished Professor of Clinical Medicine, Harvard Medical School Physician in Chief, Emeritus, Department of Medicine, Mass General.  Ausiello plans to use the oCase, and the entire oPlatform, to interrogate the relationship between scent experience, phenotype, and disease, to pave the way toward a better understanding of continuous health. 

"With oCase we are bringing scent delivery precisely to the nose, in the way that headsets bring sound precisely to the ears," says Vapor Communications co-founder, David Edwards.  "This will be critical to the emergence of scent messaging, the experience of oBooks, and finally the relevance of olfactory communication to human health.  We are thrilled to be working with Dr. Ausiello and his brilliant team at CATCH."

"The olfactory nerve, which is the pathway through which we detect smell, is the only sensory nerve with direct access to the brain, through an area called the olfactory bulb," says Dennis Ausiello. "The response to scent, in turn, may modify disparate functions in health and disease including metabolism, memory and cognition. We believe that by using an accurate, mobile, digital scent delivery platform such as the oPlatform with the new oCase, we will be able to study relationships between health state and scent sensitivity, and possibly develop a whole new generation of therapies involving scent to influence a range of metabolic and cognitive diseases."

In addition to the CATCH partnership, Vapor is exploring other uses for the oCase, which will be on display for the first time during a special October 7 dinner held in honor of the Catalan chef Ferran Adria at Café ArtScience in Cambridge, Mass. and sponsored by MIT's Solve program. The oCase will be used to present the world's first oMenu, the latest form of Vapor Communication's oBook technology, first shared in the spring and summer of 2015 at the Museum of the Moving Image. Invented by David Edwards, designed by Millimetre in Paris, and infused with over 30 unique scents created by master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, the oCase will feature a special Pine Nut scent created by Vapor Communication partner International Flavors & Fragrances, IFF.

The oCase makes scent signaling precise, repeatable, and long lasting. The current standard for scent interrogation in human clinical studies is the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT), which is based on scratch-and-sniff technology.  oCase releases scent without user contact with the scent source, from sustained-release resins embedded in the tablet case.  Users touch the case when directed by the tablet, and liberate the scent, which is released at a steady rate over many months of continued use.  With oCase, scent delivery, and diagnostics, can be digitized using oNotes and other scent-based apps, including those that share oBooks and oMedia. 

Following the launch of the oCase, Vapor Communications will launch oNotes 2.0 in the coming weeks. Available for iPhone and iPad, oNotes 2.0 fuses the company's oSnap app into oNotes 1.0 to provide a single app from which users can create, store, and play scent-tagged images, or oNotes, many thousands of which have been created by users all over the world during the last year.  Now users will be able to make more oNotes, arrange these oNotes in their personal oNote library, and play these oNotes on oPhone Duo. The Duo, first announced in the spring 2014, will become commercially available via onotes.com beginning late November 2015.  

About Vapor Communications
Vapor Communications is a Cambridge-based sensorial delivery company founded by David Edwards, his former student Rachel Field, and technology entrepreneur Don Zereski with the creative team of Le Laboratoire in Paris and Cambridge. The Company intends to bring scent messaging into contemporary living wherever scent matters, for health and memory, self-expression and entertainment, travel and the marketing of aromatic content online. The Company is partnering with leading corporations to bring scent-based messaging to consumers and industries around the world. 

About CATCH
Based at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and collaborating with various groups at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), CATCH seeks to discover new ways to quantitatively measure the human condition in health and disease. CATCH has convened a multidisciplinary group of engineers, physicians and industry partners to pioneer new human measurements (phenotypes), as well as the integrative analytic methods needed to interpret these measurements in the context of clinical and genetic data. These phenotypes, particularly those that can be measured in the context of individuals' daily lives, will transform how individuals monitor their own health, and how physicians prevent, diagnose and treat disease.

About SOLVE
Solve (http://solve.mit.edu/) is a cross-disciplinary program led by MIT (http://web.mit.edu/) convening the people and organizations addressing the world's most pressing challenges in healthcare, energy, the environment, education, food and water, civil infrastructure, and the economy.  Solve takes a pragmatic, collaborative approach that brings urgency to these difficult problems, examines essential questions and drives consensus to set a course to a solution.  Through continual evaluation and re-calibration, the program seeks to drive substantial and positive action. Solve convenes its inaugural meeting October 5–8, 2015 on the MIT Campus, inviting a charter membership of business, research, philanthropic, and policy leaders who share MIT's commitment to addressing these global issues. Solve takes place during Boston's HUBweek, as city-wide festival that celebrates the innovation, creative arts, and culture of the city. HUBweek ticketholders are invited to join the public sessions of Solve.

About DreamAir
DreamAir is a privately owned company based in New York City gallery district with a studio in Berlin Germany, headed by Master Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. The team includes two creative perfumers and design free-lancers and has partnered with prestigious corporations in order to create, invent and bring to market especially innovative scent solutions.  With "a Caress you Cannot Forget" as a motto, it intends to show via artistic, commercial and educational initiatives how olfaction and scent design is an essential part of the human emotional and decision making process.  

www.dreamair.nyc, for information contact Rosy Katich, [email protected], +1 646 589 7272, edu-Twitter: DREAMAIRNYC

SOURCE Vapor Communications