Sensory Acumen heals, thrills with smell
ORINDA, CA -- The last American soldiers left Iraq just before Christmas, but for many of the 1.5 million who served, the sights and sensations they experienced will endure for a lifetime.
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 12th annual 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology, meeting Jan. 15, 2012 in Washington, D.C. for the Innovation & Equity 2012 Symposium: Capitalizing Creativity: Job Creation and Innovation.
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.
