The 13^th meeting of the Working Group (WG) 41 of the Technical Committee (TC) 264 on air quality of the European Standard Committee (CEN) dealing with Instrumental Odour Monitoring Systems (IOMS) coded as CEN/TC 264/WG 41, took place in Bilbao, Spain the 3^rd and 4^th of July. A total of 16 experts met to discuss the new standard on IOMSs, previously known as e-noses.

A new Task Group 5 (TG5) was created in the previous meeting in Milan in order to deal with the implications of the standards on Automatic Measuring Systems (AMS) EN 141881 and EN 15267, on IOMSs. Among the many issues addressed in this meeting in Bilbao, a new proposal to bring a Quality Assurance Level (QAL) 1 was discussed.

   Traditionally odour dose-response studies have been based on questionnaires, surveys, odour diaries, etc under the scope of some guidelines and standards (e.g VDI 3883). However, this methodology has serious limitations. For example, they lack precision on recording time and location stamp of an incident. That is why a group of experts from Spain have decided to work on a new methodology to map annoyance based on citizen science and other tools. Second meeting of this group that discusses about  linking an Odour Impact Critera to an Annoyance Benchmark took place last week. The idea behind is to work together with the Spanish Accreditation Body (UNE) to publish the first standard on this subject.

   Odour Impact Criteria (OIC) set in many parts of the world, are based on dose-response psychometric studies made in Germany and the Netherlands many years ago. Nowadays, with the use of smartphones it is possible to instantaneously record time and location of an odour perception. This is a better way to assess the impact and the only way to link odour with annoyance, that is why a group of experts has met to write the first standard on annoyance mapping.