Taking the SCiO Food Analyzer Grocery Shopping

As for the last point, you are right, they are purposefully sending encrypted/encoded(?) data to your phone, which is then sent to their server. The raw spectrum will only be returned from the server if you have an even more expensive "researcher" account...

So, if the drug has a time-release coating (which many do) it's probably not going to work.

All that you say is true (I think) and yet some applications are amazing (I backed the SCiO on Kickstarter).

Namely, it can tell your body fat from a scan of your skin, and the results seem pretty accurate (same result as a Withings scale for example).

I got a scio dev kit from kickstarter. I backed it because they claimed at launch you would be able scan the leaf of a living plant and determine if it was sufficiently watered. Unfortunately this functionality, along with many other promised applets, was never built and the dev forums are prettmuch dead. When I looked into building my own model, I found the time required is pretty huge. To build a remotely useful model, one would need to scan between 200 and 300 samples. That means 200-300 individually potted plants for every plant variety you want to measure!!!

Regarding your last point - check out this youtube vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfiqdooNBb8

Cheap diffraction grating and a cheap camera; basically, the idea would be to somehow use an IR sensitive camera (most are - at least in the far-mid range), an IR source (maybe an unfocused IR laser diode?), and a diffraction grating.

Ideally for the grating you'd use one for IR - but I haven't found one that wasn't reflective-based (instead of transmissive) - there's probably a good reason (likely having to do with cheap materials and IR absorption - which is why lenses and mirrors for laser cutters tend to be pretty pricey).

Anyhow - thems the basics. Take that, get an image from the camera, run a fourier transform on the data, get the peaks, then pass it thru a trained CNN (?) - heck, you might be able to forgo the transform part and just use the data from the camera directly (repurpose imagenet or something).

Yeah - I think this whole thing could be made an open-source project; probably even an instructable...? At the very least, it could become an interesting science fair project for some enterprising kid...

I have no affiliation with SCiO other than I went to one of their meetups. But to counter your points:

- All spectroscopy is surface reading, with NIR penetrating somewhat deeper. But it's still up to you to prepare the sample.

- IIRC, there were 400 datapoints corresponding to 1 nm spaced wavelengths from 700-1100 nm. The models aren't super smart, correct, and need a lot of collective data to be useful. They were able to do more than you describe though (a demo they did was scan cheese for protein/fat composition, though to be fair those are trained models, probably with external data).

- It's up to you (and the other data providers) to prepare the sample correctly and test it the same way.

- Yeah, I don't know what they are thinking on this.

Don't get me wrong - I didn't find SCiO particularly useful and am not sure where it's going. But I wouldn't be surprised to see technological improvement either. That is, if they have a business model and further funding.

I read about Red Delicious apples a while back. Everyone I've met hates them so why do they have such a bold name? Turns out back in the day they were delicious, but farmers have aimed towards making larger and redder apples at the expense of taste so now we have beautiful red delicious apples that taste like ass and have the texture of apple sauce.

My concern is that this will lead to increased food waste, ie. retailers rejecting perfectly edible foods that don't scan well. That's already enough of an issue with irregular shaped produce.

Mentioning illegal drugs sounds always like a shady money grab is coming up. However, that's where this could truly safe lives.

It could also be good for cosmetics, as they're heterogeneous and probably pretty consistent. Although it would be limited to checking brand authenticity rather than interrogating composition

Or perhaps testing strains of mj (in the "legal" states - medical and otherwise) for potency or whatnot?

> The user starts out by simplifying the problem a bit by identifying the category of the item to be examined—it’s not “What fruit is this,” but, “This is an apple, is it any good?” Consumer Physics’ cloud-based software then taps into its knowledge base, for an apple, it defines “good” as “sweet” (hence the Brix measurement), and considers an apple’s typical range of sweetness based on thousands of scans. A graphic on the phone then places the apple on a quality range.

The important data and algorithms are held in their servers, not in the phone app. This gives them a lot of control and responsibility over the models, leading me to believe that they wouldn't store data on illegal drugs.

I also feel it's kind of scummy to keep this on the server. There is no reason that this functionality couldn't be offline and on the phone, except to let them charge you monthly for the hardware you're effectively leasing from them, rather than letting you use the device you own.

Also, I expect if this does take off that someone will replace their app's phone home behavior and sever-side components with an equivalent on localhost. Slightly later will be the cloned scanners that plug into the app. They should focus on providing higher-quality and higher-accuracy scanners than competition can achieve, rather than trying to lock out competitors.

Exactly my thought as well. Hacker news isn't very discerning with this one.

NIR could give information about the scanned surface, though in this case it's apparently a low quality/low signal NIR sensor. For this app it was originally pitched as a magic device that could identify anything, but in the shipped product you not only have to tell it the category of item you're scanning, in many cases it gives very little information (e.g. doesn't identify an orange as an orange), and that information seems highly suspect and of questionable accuracy regardless.

Everything about this campaign has been dubious. One of the first videos of an "unboxing" was a close friend of the creator who, after deleting his video, went around posting comments about how it was just "good fun" and "innovation takes years", etc. Every demo of the product is a staged example of very low hanging fruit, pardon the pun. The actual utility of this device seems deeply suspect.

Of course its all "plausible" and we all yearn for a Star Trek Tricoder, but spectrometer measurements have to be taken under controlled conditions with careful calibration or else you're going to get garbage-in/garbage-out.

That said, it sounds like harmless fun.

But if you really care about accuracy, its not that hard to assess the quality of fruit and vegetables with your own senses, don't need a spectrometer/iphone contraption.

Most nasty stuff is present in vanishingly small quantities compared to all the other crap in biomaterial, which is why most contaminant testing involves an extraction step, or even extraction+fractionation, before spectrometry.

Somewhat relatedly, inorganic ions don't have nir activity, only their complexes with organic counterions have nir activity. And there are like a gazillion different things that complex with lead/mercury/etc. in unpurified biomaterial, so direct nir measurements of a sample are not a productive approach.

That being said, it would certainly be a big moneymaker if placebo contaminant detectors became a thing with Chinese consumers like surgical masks for smog

The only solid info I seemed to get out of this article, is that it's a sugar-content analyzer paired with a food database.

except the values will change from day to day as providers change their source mixes. nobody really cares what the exact sugar or protein content of their fruits is. It doesn't correlate with "quality".

Yep, perfect use case for 'Click to Remove Element' extension.