Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak and the following distancing measures have hampered considerably the activities of sensory panels. To face this unexpected situation, a new software for remote and paperless open source sensory analysis has been developed. The software was designed to perform the training of a panel and the sensory tests considering monitoring the variability of the different environmental conditions of the judges.
The software was tested to train judges from home and judges in a sensory room (blended mode) for Quantitative Descriptive Analysis. The remote judges followed the directives of the panel leader via videoconferencing, whereas a third group of judges performed the test following the recording of previous training sessions with an asynchronous approach. Remote and asynchronous sensory analysis present some issues: the judges may not understand how to perform the test using the software; for the panel leader it is difficult to control the emotional reactions of the judges during the training and tests; the environmental (light, humidity, temperature) and sample conditions (temperature) are not standardized. Therefore, it is important to ensure standardization using the following approaches: (1) provide environmental control kits automatically interfacing with the software and give instructions to ensure uniformed environmental conditions; use tools (2) to monitor the emotional reactions and (3) to simplify the human-machine interactions and (4) introduce an explicit end-to-end model describing the management of the (remote) sensory test, including relevant tasks, external events and contextual factors that may influence the process. The software will include the monitoring of the panellists’ training performance. Discriminating tests, descriptive analysis, and time-intensity methods, statistical univariate and multivariate analysis will be also implemented.