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Pocket SCiO Spectrometer Sends Chemical Composition of Anything To Smartphones
MojoKid writes: Is that a tricorder in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? All joking aside, the handheld SCiO could truly make you feel like a member Bones McCoy's medical team. The SCiO turns science fiction into science fact by shrinking mass spectrometry technology used in traditional lab settings into a device small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. While pricey handheld spectrometers have been available for researchers, the SCiO is the first such device marketed directly at consumers. To get the SCiO down to a reasonable price point, Consumer Physics uses near-IR spectroscopy and optics typically found in smartphones to measure the light reflected from any given object. Held at a distance of 5 to 15 mm from the intended target, SCiO captures reflected spectrum data and uploads it to its own cloud platform. The company's proprietary algorithms then analyze the data and send the information back down to your smartphone (SCiO require a Bluetooth connection). Reportedly, this whole process occurs within 1.5 seconds. The hope is to empower consumers to learn more about the world around them and even about the things that we put in our mouth. You'll be able to ascertain nutritional information about the foods you eat without having to rely on labels, or even determine the ripeness of fruits and vegetables with the push of a button. The Whole Foods crowd will be all over this, one would think.
Can I test cocaine and MDMA with this?
near-IR spectroscopy does not = mass spectrometry
shrinking mass spectrometry technology used in traditional lab settings into a device small enough to fit in the palm of your hand
Surely this device has nothing whatsoever to do with a mass-spec? It doesn't appear to use any of the techniques that a mass spectrometer does (even if it produces results to the non-technical consumer that appear similar) and to use the term sends a misleading message.
Maybe I should buy a whistle and re-badge it as a "sonic screwdriver"?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If the company ever goes out of business, or discontinues the supporting service because it's 'legacy', then your fancy device is good for nothing.
Can I short this, if they go public?
Difficult to see why they can't do the calculation in the smartphone, given a modern smartphone is as powerful as an 80's supercomputer.
I see this spectrometer has its own processor: an TI-OMAP, which is an old Arm chip not very powerful, running Android:
http://www.denovix.com/ds-11-specifications/
Designing spectrometer is what I do for a living and with my experience and knowledge, I have serious doubts this device has sufficient resolving power to do what they claim it can/would/should do. To identify chemical components, you need a minimum spectral resolution (depending on the species you want to identify). To do quantitative analysis, the requirements are event higher. Typically, for solid NIR spectroscopy, I would aim at 2 to 4 cm^-1 spectral resolution. Under this, you can maybe check for the presence of a specific compound or compound family, but the capability to do so will be very dependent on the overall chemical composition.
Its possible to reduce the size of a spectrometer while somewhat keeping the resolution. But that goes only up to a certain extent... and that goes only with trade on signal to noise ratio. At some point physics overtakes wishful thinking. Reducing the instrument, and thus the optical throughput, you need longer measurement times to achieve adequate signal quality. Quantitative analysis with a (large) lab NIR spectrometer can take minutes, depending on the material being analysed. When you design spectrometers, you are constantly trading on aspect for another and by bringing a NIR spectrometer to that size, you traded a LOT of stuff away.
I also see spectral calibration being an issue with this device, then it works in reflectance and not in transmittance. It cannot be self-calibrating and directly provide a transmission/absorption spectrum. Maybe it is calibrated once during the production and assumed to be stable? If that is sufficient is, from my experience, questionable.
On the other hand, this is a very exiting breakthrough. I might even get my hands on one for fun. Why? because its, as they so well market it, a liberalisation of matter. Its a first step in being able to identify any substance that we get our hands on. While it may not yet be able to provide a full chemical make-up of a product, with enough a priori information it may be very useful.
Let me give you an example where such a device can be its money worth. When you buy fruits and vegetables that are bio/organic, you want them really to be that way. This decision to spend more money on these healthier food items is solely based on trust, which is often exploited. I doubt that the analysis of such a product can do what they claim (most of the return information is most likely deduced from the a priori information provided). But even with a limited spectral resolution and sensitivity, it should be able to identify spectral signatures of typical herbicides and pesticides.
Well said.
I look forward to them producing lots of spectra of air and water with tiny sample signals.
There are a lot of times where it's difficult to determine if something is plastic (and what kind), metal (gold? copper? silver? steel? titanium? some alloy? what percent of each?), glass or ceramic, and so on. I wonder if this thing would be capable of making that determination, because that could be quite useful for a lot of people.
There are way more Kickstarter failures than successes and seeing that this is one of the more ambitious projects, it is very unlikely to actually deliver anything close to what was promised.
Here is another analysis of the product by a analytical scientist.-
http://www.cnet.com/news/kicks...
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Dihydrogen monoxide (H2O) might not be bad, but fracking certainly is.
Thanks for your insights. Still trying to decide whether something like this should go on my wish list ;) (see above for my potential uses).
How accurate, exactly, do you think such a device could be? Obviously it's not going to be pulling out the sort of precision of a professional spectrometer. But you mention, for example, being able to identify the signatures of herbicides and pesticides. Do you mean, for example, "This contains imidacloprid", or more like, "This contains a nicotinoid of some variety"?
How useful do you think it could be on identifying mineral species - say, distinguishing between different zeolites? Or, back to food, if given, say, a mango, to get readings of, say, water, sugar (in general, or specific sugars), fat (in general, or specific categories of fats, or specific fats), protein (in general, or specific categories of proteins, or specific common protiens... obviously it's not going to be able to pull out 5 ppb of Some-Complex-Unique-Protein), common vitamins (generally found in dozens of ppm quantity - some more, some less), minerals (likewise), etc?
"You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
Most of the materials you cited are usually marked with a symbol or code that you can look up.
You will not be able to determine raw elements with a NIR spectrometer. With a NIR-LWIR spectrometer, you can only identify molecular compounds, because what you are observing is actually the vibration modes of the molecules. In this spectral range, you will have a lot of signature for organic compounds. So you may be able determine if something is made of plastic. Determining the kind is trickier because most plastics are actually very similar and would require a device with higher spectral resolution to make such a determination.
For elementary elements (iron, copper, gold, etc.), you can forget it. That device will not help you.
That actually doesn't sound that bad:
That would hardly be useless. I presume that the person knows whether what they're looking at is a fruit or an alcoholic beverage. It's not a big deal to ask the user to do whatever degree of categorization that they can to help it out. And being able to pick out common drugs? Definitely not useless.
"You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
That article hits the nail on the head, although I do not share the negative view on the conclusions.
Why should ordinary citizens need spectrometers? Sounds like terrorism to me. AUTHORITIES!!!
That's the best case scenario. I'm usually an optimist, but this is Kickstarter we are talking about.
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What happens when the company goes out of business or decides to stop supporting the product? I can also see the government compelling them not to reveal certain chemical signatures. Software should not be dictated from the "cloud". It needs to be users that are in control. Specifically I don't see a reason why we can't have the software and install it on our own servers if we wish to. So long as we have the option of our own servers I can then concede to using non personal cloud servers for processing speed.
Holy hell, there are still people that know what they're talking about on Slashdot? Before they made all the articles clickbait you guys were everywhere. I miss the interesting analysis of articles by professionals in relevant fields and I don't know of any web site that still has that.
Thank you for taking the time. Every time I come back to this website it's because I'm hoping to see a post like yours.
You should get one, you will be able to check your meds are not out of date......
Yes, there are lots of coins out of China marked Au or Ag that are simply plated.
Unfortunately, this requires an expensive XRF Analyzer to determine.
It should also be able to do validations, ie you can say "is this valium", and it would be able to say yes or no, by matching the signature of valium as seen through its hardware. I guess that why the cloud db is there, its not so much doing analysis and working out what the thing is from its consituents, but matching the signal it gets with a db of things that have been scaned by tbe device that are already known.
But even with a limited spectral resolution and sensitivity, it should be able to identify spectral signatures of typical herbicides and pesticides.
I would be amazed if it could. With a sufficiently large database to draw from, and clever processing, I can imagine being able to identify the bulk constituent, but anything else would be lost in the noise. It might be able to tell you if your apple is waxed or not, but not if it's got ppm levels of pesticides. TBH, I'll be pretty impressed if this could identify different plastics or other relatively pure materials. It is certainly a nice idea though.
There's a reason IR spectroscopy has fallen by the wayside in chemistry - it doesn't give you enough information, and just hasn't kept up with other techniques. It's used for specific tasks, such as monitoring a reaction, but it's not a go-to analysis technique any more.
Hey, "sexconker (1179573)", just don't make yesterday's mistake of forgetting to tick the "post anonymously" box:
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
These guys have been marketing a device that looks rather suspiciously like a spectrometer for inspecting food for a few years now:
http://tellspec.com/
I've been following this for near two years now and was debating getting signed up on the beta program. The barrier for me has been the monthly service cost, expecting that the device may be rather limited without a good corpus of crowd-sourced data propping it up.
- yummy rootbeer.
One of these new chips that do spectroscopy in smt sized chips. Accuracy 1nm, Resolution 10nm. Below 10$ per pop.
Sounds useable. From what i remember these chips have many tiny coated windows to filter different wavelengths which (after post processing) results in the actual reading.
My thoughts exactly. I "purchased" one through indiegogo almost two years ago: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tellspec-what-s-in-your-food#/story To this day, still vaporware. Supposedly developer units are shipping soon.
There's a reason IR spectroscopy has fallen by the wayside in chemistry - it doesn't give you enough information, and just hasn't kept up with other techniques. It's used for specific tasks, such as monitoring a reaction, but it's not a go-to analysis technique any more.
I couldn't disagree more (although one would say I'm somewhat biased on the applications of IR spectroscopy). First I know no research or production analytic lab without at least one IR spectrometer. In quality insurance they are also used a lot. For in-situ monitoring of reaction, IR spectrometer are generally not appropriate because to slow at sufficient spectral resolution. You can only monitor very slow reactions.
Maybe you are thinking of a specific branch, where other techniques are more appropriate or practical?
And I am surprised by the statement that vibrational spectroscopy doesn't give you enough information. Maybe not enough for a specific task such as identifying elementary elements, but you get a lot of information on the molecular structure of a compound. With gasses you can also do very precise quantitative analysis. I think only NMR spectroscopy will give your more information on the molecular structure and an NMR certainly does not fit in the palm of the hand.
Thanks for your insights. Still trying to decide whether something like this should go on my wish list ;) (see above for my potential uses).
Don't expect to much of it for the first generation / first product. Once you get a few competitors and iterations on the technology, you can have a serious look at it. I'd also wait to see a view "in-depth technical reviews" with labor-based comparison studies. To satisfy your curiosity, if your budget allows it, it will definitely be worth it (assuming it at least work a little). I expect the results at first to feel a little like translating something in some language with google translate and translating it back with bing.
How accurate, exactly, do you think such a device could be? Obviously it's not going to be pulling out the sort of precision of a professional spectrometer. But you mention, for example, being able to identify the signatures of herbicides and pesticides. Do you mean, for example, "This contains imidacloprid", or more like, "This contains a nicotinoid of some variety"?
It's hard to say without having more detailed information on the spectral range, spectral resolution, illumination source, detector type and sensitivity, and, most importantly, the type of spectrometer. From the description, it seems that it is a diffracting spectrometer, but that again comes in different flavours. Long story short, I can only guestimate the performance of it based on my experience designing such devices with the information they provide. Now, some molecular basis have specific signatures even a low resolution device could identify. Because these molecular basis are shared by various different molecules, it may be difficult to do more as to identify a group such as nicotinoids. And for the same reason you will have a lot of false positives.
This is where the apriori information play an important role. If you are looking at an apple, the spectral database-based/cloud-based analysis program knows what to expect and can raise a warning flag if it sees something which might be a nicotinoid, because that's not expected in the spectra of a "clean" apple. The same analysis program will ignore the warning if you say you are analysing a cigarette. This, btw. may also lead to false negative... but with low spectral resolution, I believe that the cloud-based analysis will play a crucial role. And this is actually the most interesting part of this innovation.
How useful do you think it could be on identifying mineral species - say, distinguishing between different zeolites?
I've never saw an IR spectrometer used for mineralogy or metallurgy. I doubt it can provide you with any significant information in those fields. Other factors you cannot see in vibrational spectroscopy play a too large role.
Or, back to food, if given, say, a mango, to get readings of, say, water, sugar (in general, or specific sugars), fat (in general, or specific categories of fats, or specific fats), protein (in general, or specific categories of proteins, or specific common protiens... obviously it's not going to be able to pull out 5 ppb of Some-Complex-Unique-Protein), common vitamins (generally found in dozens of ppm quantity - some more, some less), minerals (likewise), etc?
This is where I believe the advertisement is way to promising and optimistic. I'd occupy your day to do that on a very expensive and high-performance laboratory IR spectrometer. Under laboratory conditions.
Take this example of sugar spectra from the Agilent website. They don't specify it, but that's most likely 4 cm^-1 resolution. You see that it is possible to identify specific sugar compounds, but also that the spectra are quite alike. Now reduce the spectral resolution to something like 128 cm^-1 and you'll have a hard time identifying the exact type of sugar.
Good thing Gollum didn't have one of these; he would have won the riddle game!
Xrf will just show you the composition of the plating, unless its just really, really thin. Sonic and conductivity tests are the preferred non destructive test methods for precious metals.
But their cloud platform can immediately send your personal data to the DEA. This is one of those things where you look at the ToS very carefully.
But because it's a Microsoft product, it will be too riddled with bugs and viruses to work as intended. A woman who has this implanted will shoot out babies like a Pez dispenser.
I work with laboratory NIR spectrometers.
On the product site https://www.consumerphysics.com/myscio/technology
there are no specifications for wavelength range, stability, spectral resolution, or signal-to-noise ratios.
Or you could just use Archimedes' 2200-year-old approach and find the density.
(Okay, might not work if they've alloyed it with tungsten or uranium or something.)
Perhaps you'd like to share or recommend a list how to identify different materials without advanced machinery? like http://www.instructables.com/i...
We don't have one in our lab! My company makes functionalised materials (so solid state) but most of the synthesis and research we do is standard organic chem. GCMS, NMR and ICP do us just fine. We did test a reflectance IR instrument but never managed to get any useful data - in fairness that's probably partly due to lack of expertise.
Interesting that you mention IR not being suitable for reaction monitoring: Mettler's ReactIR has generated quite a bit of hype (well, perhaps 5-10 years ago) and is really quite a nice bit of kit. Easily good enough for reactions on the ten-minutes to hours timescale.
And I am surprised by the statement that vibrational spectroscopy doesn't give you enough information
OK, perhaps that was unfair: for certain tasks it can be useful, and can give information that other techniques can't like bond strengths (and angles/strain perhaps?), but only with nice, pure samples. For routine organic synthesis though all the information you need can be got much more simply and intuitively (albeit expensively!) with NMR. You can get half-decent desktop NMR now, about the size of a PC.
I don't think most smartphones can even focus properly at those distances.
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According to their video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., one of the uses is to detect the sweetness of certain fruits. The video shows them scanning an apple to determine the level of sugar. This would be useful if you are in the grocery store and want to pick the sweetest from among apples, peaches, etc. Do you think their tool is sufficient for this purpose? What about fruits with skins you do not eat like watermelon? Or, what about fruits like pomegranates? If their tool would not be sufficient, is there a handheld spectrometer that could be used?
Maybe bars could license this technology and build in overhead sensors that continually scan patron's drinks for date-rape drugs. And maybe the cops could put them at strategic locations to look for drug or gunpowder or explosive residue on passers-by, who they could then stop because they'll have probable cause.
[...]I have serious doubts this device has sufficient resolving power to do what they claim it can/would/should do. To identify chemical components, you need a minimum spectral resolution (depending on the species you want to identify). To do quantitative analysis, the requirements are event higher. [...]
So this device might be actually able differentiate between a block of cheese and an apple :-), (like suggested by the article photos), but expecting to be a smartphone CSI able to solve mysteries with a click of an app will lead to buyers' remorse.
That said, I believe the device producers are not trying to mislead potential buyers, but the media coverage of the device has been largely hyperbolic.
But the important question not addressed: does it make the cool Star Trek tricorder sound when you use it?
I thought spectrometry was destructive testing. I was under the impression that it was burned and the gas was analyzed. It turns out that that is, more specifically, gas chromatography - mass spectrography. I did not know this. Your posts motivated me to learn a little bit more, it is not my area of expertise, so I appreciate it. One of the things I value most about this site is the diversity of experts who are here and willing to share their education with us unwashed masses.
Anyhow, mass spectrometry is done by bombarding the item with electrons. What is the difference between that and this and how would this be able to make any determinations just by observing the IR data? I am assuming/guessing it is reflective in nature and that the reflection is then interpreted?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I had a tricorder app on my phone at one point. It did not do anything interesting (I seem to recall it used signal strength and GPS data to make numbers that meant nothing) but it was fun to pull out and play with. It served absolutely no function other than amusing me and bewildering the occasional onlooker.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Maybe, the point was not what is or is not bad, but rather what uneducated people THINK is or is not bad.
What was the latest craze that I heard? We shouldn't be consuming chemicals that a 5 year old can't pronounce. Like what in the actual fuck.
Vibrational spectroscopy is non-destructive. You simply observe the vibrational (or translation, or rotation) modes of molecules. Most systems measure what is absorbed (ie. you have an known IR source and measure what of it doesn't get through - assuming the absorbed photons corresponds to vibration modes of the molecule). Although this is an active measurement approach, the energy needs are too long to cause damage to the molecule or samples. But you could go in at higher energy level... this is basically what a microwave oven does, exiting the rotational modes of water molecules. It also work to some extent with reflection, but it will be dependent upon the nature of the sample.
But a vibrating molecule will also emit radiation at wavelength corresponding to the energy of the vibration modes. This enables passive measurement which is not only non-destructive, but also allows measurement without any kind of interaction. Emission IR spectroscopy is used a lot for remote sensing of the atmosphere for example.
So either you are totally passive or only sending a week IR signal which partly gets absorbed and partly transmitted/reflected. A typical IR source for laboratory instruments is a glowbar. That simply a small wire heated to about 800C... it looks a lot like a car cigarette lighter. You won't rip of electrons of your samples with that ;)
Much thanks. That is, for the most part, how I understood it would likely be. I appreciate your time. Thank you for putting it into words that even I can understand. It is neat taking a look into other areas of expertise.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I don't think that would really work. Most meds are good long long after the "expiration" date.
However it might be good to see if your meds were really good in the first place, like that "Viagra" you got from India.