Independent research institute · New York
SHEMIM investigates the signal the body emits continuously — the scent of the breath foremost — and the tools that can turn it into an honest, non-invasive measure of well-being a person can read and reshape.
SHEMIM · שםים · شميم · a sweet fragrant breeze
The premise
The human body is richly self-instrumented. It broadcasts its state continuously — and the breath gathers the broadest signal of all: a single exhaled stream where metabolism, the body’s microbial life, its immune tone, and its internal clocks, among others, leave their trace. Outside of acute care, clinical practice samples almost none of it.
SHEMIM’s work begins from one question: what becomes possible when we learn to read these signals well, early, continuously, and without invasive procedures?
An open question we keep
Long before the embryo begins, the scent receptors are already present.
Science calls smell the least understood of our senses, and the closer biology looks, the less it behaves like merely a sense. These receptors are already there in the very first cells of a life: long before the nose grows, weeks before there is any embryo at all, and even before fertilisation. What are they doing there?
See the questions that drive usResearch program
Think of the body as an orchestra — each organ an instrument with its own note, and the breath gathers them all. A still instrument is measured by frequency alone; a living one has frequency and fragrance. Life is oscillation, and scent is where the whole orchestra is heard at once.
Exhaled breath and body scent reflect the body’s state, and unlike most measures they can be read non-invasively, continuously, and by the person themselves. SHEMIM studies how to capture that signal and model it — toward an index of well-being a person can both read and, by how they live, reshape.
Why scent?What shapes the signal — the levers we can move
The research is organized as a connected knowledge graph rather than isolated studies — so insight in one domain can inform another, and the whole can be reasoned about as a single system. It is how the many levers above are read as one chord.
Explore the researchApproach
Health, environment, and behavior are one coupled system. SHEMIM studies them as one rather than in silos.
Non-invasive sensing that meets people in daily life, with data the individual owns, not episodic measurement controlled by an institution.
SHEMIM distinguishes clearly between what evidence supports, what is inference, and what remains hypothesis. Speculative threads are presented as such.
Status · early-stage
SHEMIM is early-stage. The work is currently at the level of conceptual architecture and research design: a structured body of frameworks, not yet pilots, prototypes, or published results. This is stated plainly on purpose: we are building the foundation in the open, and actively seeking collaborators, critics, and partners who can help move specific threads from concept to evidence.
Engage
If you work on clinical signals, chemosensing, machine learning for biomedical data, microbiome dynamics, or chronobiology, SHEMIM would value your read on the program, your critique, and your collaboration.
Get in touchAnyone can help move this forward. If the work resonates and you can make an introduction, open a door, or help it reach the people who can put it to the test, we’d like to hear from you.
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