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Startup Uses Sensor Networks To Debug Science Experiments (xconomy.com)
gthuang88 writes: Environmental factors like temperature, humidity, or lighting often derail life science experiments. Now Elemental Machines, a startup from the founders of Misfit Wearables, is trying to help scientists debug experiments using distributed sensors and machine-learning software to detect anomalies. The product is in beta testing with academic labs and biotech companies. The goal is to help speed up things like biology research and drug development. Wiring up experiments is part of a broader effort to create "smart labs" that automate some of the scientific process.
While true, this kind of effort can help scientists discover things that they have overlooked.
I know that it is difficult to believe, but scientists are generally human and they're not omniscient. Their experiments often have some kind of problem.
Love sees no species.
This sort of thing has always been available for pharmaceutical manufacturing, but has been long overlooked on the research side. I've been at a few science research based engineering companies that collect this kind of data already, but don't do anything to analyse it unless something catastrophic happens. A software tool that could enable visualization of this data across experiments will extremely valuable as we remove technician to technician variation (via robotics) and a synthetic biology becomes more common place, and could prove as invaluable as well plate edge effect analysis already included in major bio-analysis software packages such as spotfire.
Yes, they do need to record good notes. But the times are changing. There is huge potential in a cheap general purpose sensor array. Imagine a system that recorded temperature, humidity, room brightness, vibrations, maybe some chemical species concentrations, and maybe data from a set of special sensors in an apparatus. This is straight forward to do, but right now it requires someone to write custom software and integrate a variety of sensors. If there becomes a standard that just ran with very little customization, it could greatly decrease the amount of 'something happened to this experiment but I don't know what'. It is easy to say 'they should take better lab notes', but no one has ever been able to accurately record all the relevant conditions. It is an imaginary world we describe in which the conditions of the experiment are recorded in the lab notebook. In research, you always have factors that you don't yet know are important, and high quality cheap general purpose sensors could be a big benefit.
As Richard Horton put in his essay (What is medicine's 5-sigma), 'As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”'. There is pressure for 'measurable progress'. This has a number of nasty side effects. Things which do not lead directly to publishable results fall by the wayside, and things which serve no other purpose than to potentially explain desirable results as experimental errors, again, offer little which would result in 'measurable progress'. More and more, career scientists are being forced to chase jobs and funding, and to either produce what will yield future funding, or find a new career. Somebody who takes three times as long to produce less remarkable results, and at greater financial cost, will most likely struggle for work. Somebody who does enough to get published, and gets twice as much published in the same time, and costing less, will appear to be better to financial pen-pushers. This places a negative pressure on standards.
John_Chalisque
"It's humid today" isn't exactly a scientific measurement. I'd expect some kind of electronic measurement with barometer, thermometer and hygrometer. You can get an all in one wireless system with automatic logging for less than £40. If you want to splurge out on a bit more (£130), you can get a wireless weather station that connects via the internet to a smartphone. There are probably others with more features and functionality, but it was the first I found.
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