The aim is to provide greater emotional balance in stressful situations. For example, a personalized scent can be released to promote relaxation in cases of exam anxiety. After conditioning, the scent helps to maintain calm even in stressful moments—a principle that can be applied in many areas.

To gain deeper insights into the relationship between scent and emotional well-being, we conducted interviews with experts across different fields. We conducted interviews with an olfactory researcher Prof. Dr. med Thomas Hummel, an aromatherapist Silke Schmidt and a psychiatrist Dr. Simon Riedesser. These conversations revealed valuable nuances in how scents are perceived and processed, especially in therapeutic contexts.

While we learned that scents can influence mood and physical response, the interviews also highlighted critical limitations of aromatherapy — particularly when applied to mental health. Our findings uncovered several recurring challenges, which we synthesized into core pain points to guide the next steps in our design process.

The basis of our project is classical conditioning, which combines two stimuli with one response. We chose scents as the neutral stimulus because the sense of smell has the most direct connection to the brain and memories with scents are particularly emotional and vivid. This formed the basis for our Invention Design project “dufte“.

The measured values collected via our deployed technology are evaluated by an artificial intelligence in order to capture the current emotions of our user. The goal here is to help achieve more emotional balance in certain situations that the person finds disturbing. For example, this can help people with exam anxiety by releasing a personalized scent that is associated with relaxation. After the conditioning phase, the scent can help induce relaxation in nervous situations such as an exam. This principle could also be applied to many other situations.