Sensory Acumen has the smell of innovation
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a malady that afflicts many veterans. Increasingly researchers are finding that addressing the illness requires simulating the circumstances that triggered the response.
It wasn't the market that Charlene Childers Coleman, CEO of Sensory Acumen Inc. and Michael Coleman, Chief Creative Officer and Carl Childers, Vice President, originally foresaw for their initial olfactory sensation delivery mechanism.
Game Skunk was developed to work with the more dramatically immersive world of video games. "If you're playing a racing game, it will give you the smell of burnt rubber," said Michael Coleman during a segment of the documentary A Great Day in Gaming : From Queens to Silicon Valley: The Gerald A. Lawson Story.
The company showed its wares during the massive Consumer Electronics Show Jan. 10-13.
But when they saw a researcher using smell to treat wounded war veterans, they were more than willing to expand their horizons, said Charlene Coleman.
The three are among the 13th annual 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology, which meet Jan. 15, 2013 in Washington, D.C. for the Innovation & Equity 2013 Symposium: Keeping America First in Technology: Public Innovation and Supplier Diversity.
Sensory Acumen entered the Catapult Innovation Showcase, an initiative to identify promising technologies which can grow into global industries.
Charlene Coleman has been fascinated with technology since her father showed her a digital watch at the age of two. Through a career in consumer electronics marketing, she's studied the interface between people and their gadgets.
As the family of innovators choose the market to bring smell into technology to launch their own company, they've also made a commitment to take the development through every stage of manufacturing and distribution.
"It's important to us to build a company, not just to develop something and spin it off," said Charlene Coleman.
They're adding an important new feature to a $23 billion video game industry, not unlike Jerry Lawson, creator of the first cartridge game console, the Channel F, in 1972 for Fairchild.
