SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor | Hacker News Reader

SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor

kickstarter.com

35 pointsklintcho17 comments

Most likely a scam. The Healbe GoBe, and the TellSpec supposedly operated on the same principles. You can't do Raman spectroscopy in a lit room with a low wattage laser. If they did have the technology, then they could easily get a contract to produce these from the government.

This is the state of the art:

Agilent 4300 FTIR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVKg3s4GswU

Large battery for the laser, interchangeable interfaces, "under 5lbs".

Or this...

TruDefender FT

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

3lbs

They never claimed to be doing Raman spectroscopy.

This sounds like a Tricorder from Star Trek, yeah?

This seems remarkably useless. Their only use case they present is figuring out how many calories are in the things you eat, which you can already figure out by looking it up by name (chances are if you are finding and eating random things you're not carrying around a portable spectrometer). Even if it were more convenient to carry around a dedicated calorie-tester device, I hightly doubt that it would be at ALL accurate just looking at the skin of most things you eat. It might be accurate if it's using a spectrum "fingerprinting" technique to identify what it is you are eating and look it up in a table, but it's likely going to be less accurate than your own ability to assess whether something is an apple or a pear.

Oh, I guess they also say you can test medicines. I guess that does solve a lot of problems - I can't tell you how many times I've found unlabeled pills lying around and thought, "If only I knew what kind of medication this was!" Gone are the days of "pop-and-pray", I suppose.

Or for detecting gluten in food before eating it? The real question, is what can it accomplish in practice?

They say they can't detect amounts less than 1%, and it's pointless to assume there's even that little unless you scan the entire portion of meal you're eating (there may be no gluten in the area you scan, but there may very well be in another).

Oh I guess also for checking plant, soil and water, possibly also for rock formations. Seemingly those are not interesting subjects to you, so it may be remarkably useless to you. In any case, it's expected that a "molecular sensor" will be more interesting for those with an interest in the sciences (especially on the field) than for the average, dieting joe.

there is an app on the market for med identification: medsnap.com

(disclosure: i worked as a subcontractor on parts of the app)

I am at an internet of things meetup at Google Tel Aviv and just saw a first hand demo of the sensor. I can guarantee this is real and working.

Does anyone know what IR sensor they could be using, I thought for alcohol spectroscopy measurement you'd need an expensive InGaAs sensor

A fictitious one?

If this is not a scam, it might be perfect for an aquaponics water quality sensor (if it can detect single ppm quantities of ammonia, nitrates, and nitrites). They specifically mention hydroponic solutions analysis.

As far as I understand this, the scanner is nothing more than a glorified barcode-scanner. It can only identify items already in their database and all the properties that it can find about the scanned item is stuff that has been manually entered into the database.

So if I scan a piece of cheese, I won't be getting the data about my specific piece of cheese but rather the same information from the back of the package which was manually entered into their database.

Kudos for the skepticism here. Sorry to have to rain on anyone's parade, but when there is a 'need' for opacity regarding the specifics of the technology in an announcement which exclusively confines itself to positivity in the way that this does. Admit it, 'an analytical chemist in the palm of your hand' does sound magical, but surely we are all duty-bound to ask probing questions. Personally, I am getting a good feeling about this project, but I sense that am just being swept up in the excitement. So please, please continue to act as a counterbalance to my optimism. The risks posed by either being misled or by sharing unrealistic enthusiasm can only be mitigated by a relentless disregard for such sentiments. I want to believe the dream that the protagonists portray: I need others who are less convinced to challenge it, even if I feel irritated by their cynicism.

Just an FYI, I have a close friend who is an employee at this company. While I know nothing about the field, they're a real company with real employees and real products, so I don't think it's a scam in the way some people here are saying.

(Not going to comment on whether anything in the post is "misleading" since I don't know enough of the field to even begin to understand that).

SCAM? All these bloggers that saw this work with their own eyes. Not sure anyone saw HealBe or TellSpec work. Ever. Pretty sure this is not a SCAM.

http://gigaom.com/2014/04/29/consumer-physics-150-smartphone...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2148944/meet-scio-the-handhel...

http://www.medgadget.com/2014/04/scio-handheld-molecular-sca...

http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/29/scio-handheld-sensor-can-d...

"saw this work"

You mean saw a mock-up, employee of ConsumerPhysics.

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