5 Smartphone apps to improve your 5 senses

Take a look at your smartphone. There’s an app for everything – an app to unravel a roll of toilet paper, an app that's a dog whistle, and even an app that tells you the best time to use the bathroom during a movie.
Here are some more useful apps (for the most part). Check out these five smartphone applications that are helping people with their five senses.
 
1. Hearing: I-Hear Free

With this i-Hear free app, all a user has to do is put earphones on and start the app to get instant sound amplification. There’s a volume control, a mute function, and a gain level indicator, and a sound meter. For a fee, you can upgrade to a version with additional features.

2. Vision: PEEK

Currently in Kenya, doctors are using an app called PEEK (Portable Eye Examination Kit) that is helping to save people from blindness. The smartphone app uses a camera to scan the lens of the eye for cataracts. The camera can check a glasses prescription, diagnose cataracts, and even examine the eye for diseases like glaucoma and diabetes. In just seconds, doctors are getting a clear image of the back of the eye.
Then, doctors can take the image and e-mail it to Moorfield’s Eye Hospital in the United Kingdom and receive feedback. The app is being tested on 5,000 Kenyans.

3. Smell: Nose Roast/ Scentee

Japanese app called “Nose Roast” works in conjunction with a “Scentee” device that hooks up to your iPhone and allows users to smell ribs, beef, and buttered potatoes right from their phone.  The app will be released in Japan on November 15. According to the company, people can save money on a meal by eating some rice while indulging in the scents of a more expensive meal (and save calories, too).

4. Taste: Tastebud

The Tastebud app is not one that necessarily improves your sense of taste, but it can help you make one tasty meal without the trip to the supermarket. Next time you want to cook but don’t feel like going grocery shopping for ingredients, fire up Tastebud. The app finds recipes for ingredients that are already in your home.

5. Touch: Cut Fingers

Developers haven’t quite figured out a way to improve our tactile sense of touch with a smartphone app. Yes, there are textures and fabric apps, apps for those who sew, but there’s also a smartphone game that uses your fingers (the tools you touch things with).

The app is called Cut Fingers, and it’s rather gruesome. It’s a good thing you can’t feel it. You can finger-duel with others in real time and you can place your finger in the guillotine and hope that you remove it before the blade drops.