For several years I worked in spectroscopy. It's REALLY tough to take a sensor out of a controlled lab and into the uncontrolled real world and get clear, unambiguous results like this video shows. Usually the absorption signal you're trying to measure is tiny compared to changes due to background fluctuations, etc. Things tend to only work well for special types of materials that have very distinct absorption properties. There are massive unknowns here and I would never fund them unless they opened up about what spectroscopic technique they're using.
I wrote this elsewhere in this comment section but it is directly relevant to your sentence.
It is probably very similar to how Ubisoft made Just Dance using the Wii controller. The Wii controller was really horrible in terms of what you could read from it (it had no clue what your body position was), but if you stored what measurements you got from people dancing properly you could score people against that. Basically there was enough degrees of freedom to identify decent dancing to a degree and if you hid what was actually going on people though it sort of worked. Although the Wii-based Just Dance is horrible compared to the XBox version that used the Kinetic.
The key is to hide the intermediate results and profile a lot of things using the same crap sensor and then do fuzzy matching between the bad results. This works if there is enough discernible degrees of freedom.
Hello. I am interested to read more about the potential sources of variation in measurement with an NIR Spectrometer.
Specifically the effect of environmental conditions and of nearby system interactions, such as ambient radiation, ambient temperature, temperature of instrument or workpiece, contamination on the surface of the workpiece, complexity of workpiece composition, etc. Could you help me with some reading suggestions?
Thanks!
Some thoughts from an organic chemist who has a decent amount of experience using IR spectroscopy.
- IR spectroscopy is one of several methods used together to determine the structure of a molecule. It's certainly not definitive by itself.
- Some functional groups in molecules will give very specific signals (1700 cm^-1 for carbonyl functional groups, C=O), but for a lot of other functional groups, you get very weak signals that can sometimes be hard to distinguish
- IR works pretty good for pure compounds, but when you start to measure mixtures, the overlapping signals can get very difficult to isolate and identify
- As rjdagost mentioned, taking a sensor out of the lab will lead to all sorts of issues. Any stray light will likely cause any readings to look like garbage
I could see this technology being useful to identify different types of plastic. You have a limited universe of possible materials along with some pretty specific functional groups that are either there or not.
To use it as a "molecule sensor for all", seems a big problem to try and tackle.
And how the hell does it determine the ripeness of a avocado through the skin?
If your only exposure is analytical lab work (where by definition the work is difficult), you may not be familiar with the breadth of field utility of near-IR.
[edit: removed LMGTFY link - sorry, that was rude. But please don't pull the expert card outside your area of expertise: NIR has been used to assess fruit ripeness for decades]
One of the proposed use cases of the SCiO is pharmaceutical identification. Consumer Physics needs to be EXTREMELY careful with marketing this use. I would actually discourage this type of application if I were them.
SCiO is based-on near-IR spectroscopy, instead of typical IR spectroscopy. Even though they both share the same "IR" in the name. The way how these technique work can be significantly different.
SCiO do not use typical IR spectroscopy. For near-IR typically, chemometrics (or let's say PCA) has to be used to get any type useful information from the result.
There doesn't seem to be any mention of what exactly new technology is this. I would expect all the patents filed at this stage and this information be public - unless there is something fishy or they are going trade-secret route which would be very difficult.
They say the device can detect materials of 1% concentration. But what kind of materials? Spectroscopy is hard, precise measurements are even harder.
Also why are they running $200K campaign? It seems they already have significant staff and $200K would be peanuts as a goal.
> Also why are they running $200K campaign? It seems they already have significant staff and $200K would be peanuts as a goal.
A lot of people use Kickstarter as a marketing means rather than a fundraising means. At least one of their cofounders is a VC thus I expect they already have VC funds or at least very significant angel funds.
I managed to come upon a couple interesting pertinent articles. One about other, similar Kickstarter projects that turned out to be scammy[1]. And another article, written by the same journalist about scio[2].
Very cool idea, but I hate that it must have data connectivity to work. Not only that, they won't actually give users the raw scan results! You have to transmit them and then get the analyzed results only.
Reality is that many such services inevitably go under, and then your device is useless. Especially when the service is as compute intensive as this one sounds.
That is indeed a very big catch. Almost backed this on impulse before reading the full description.
Looks like you have to pay separately for each individual use case as well!
Hard to see how they will compete with the inevitable clones, unless they get really lucky with patents. The nickel-and-dime scheme is not only consumer unfriendly, but probably a strategic mistake.
I second that! It's an unnecessary date of expiry for hardware. You see that in every fitness armband and more and more apps. In two years ahead it could end up as a useless piece of electronics.
In the past we used cloud features for offline tracking in AR applications because an iPhone 3GS wasn't capable of real time pose reconstruction. But today it seems more like a lock-in and a way to collect data. A quad-core cpu on a phone should do most tasks offline.
I assume that using the SDK they provide lets you access the raw scan results. It would severely limit the possibilities for the apps they want developers to work on on top of their device.
I see a sort of structural flaw. They seem to be matching measurements against known materials and then reporting that. But where is the utility? Figuring out whether a pill is asprin or tylenol? I'd be interested in identifying characteristic of -new- materials unknown to the database. That's where the raw information is really crucial.
This seems like it could be pretty useful to, say, the blind. Also a great educational tool, a notion which isn't just limited to children (one of the primary drivers of change is consciousness raising -- e.g. a dieter monitoring their food intake may find this tool useful).
IR Spectroscopy is purely a pattern matching game. All it will ever do is compare a spectrum to a known one. The raw information would be useful to very few people outside of a lab environment.
That said, I will probably recommend that my PI order one for our lab.
Does anyone have an email address to contact them directly? I'm concerned this might be a scam and I want to ask them a few in depth questions and I'd rather not be forced to do that through kickstarter or twitter.
Knowing the people behind this, I don't think it's a scam. They have a good staff, so I think they are certainly trying to make this a reality. Are they "hustling their MVP" in startup speak? Maybe, I don't know, I never saw the product (nor did I ask to). Are these people scammers? Absolutely not, to the best of my knowledge.
You are not very intelligent.
1)Considering the CEO or CHO went to MIT Sloan Business school I would try [email protected]
2) Since the company's website is www.consumerphysics.com I would try googling [email protected] and you will find this gem: http://www.bezalel.ac.il/alumni/workforgrads/?thread=9142
It is in Hebrew but according to google translate it has the Phone and email of the founder.
So I called him and talked to him. I said I think it is a scam. HE CAME TO MY HOUSE here in the US, I am not kidding!!!
He sat at my table with the gadget and I had a bunch of pills, fruit and just random stuff from the fridge. He let me use it while he was on the phone, no gimmicks, no sales pitches, no hovering, no excuses.
It works pretty well for a prototype. Did not detect the alcohol percentage in the wine. Had no problems with pills and fruit.
Interesting that the first comments are slating this for being cloud-based; in this particular case I think that's like slating Google for being cloud based. The raw data will make sense to very few people without the very large database of "known" things to match against. And that large database will be continually updated as people try new things.
Having said that, I'm not sure who the target market really is. It's basically a Cool Science Toy. Educational use? But in that case maybe it would be nice to show the raw data just to give an impression of how it works.
The problem is not with being based on external database - the problem is with that database being privately owned by startup, which is almost certain to disappear within a year or three, at which point the device you bought will be useless.
I'd personally be fine with cloud-based recognition if the database was open, free to copy and host locally.
That, and also not giving access to raw data pretty much kills 90% of possible uses for the devices, turning a cool piece of tech into another pretty much worthless gizmo.
Could be very very good for drug users. Being able to find out 'what pills are these' would dramatically change the nature of that marketplace, I think.
Taste and smell are already pretty good at this in the noisy background that we live in. I'd really like to see how this works out in practice and if they achieve any degree of accuracy. Labs are labs for a reason, it's to reduce the number of variables you have to contend with while trying to read experimental data from sensors.
I'm imagining it would have to be. A raw near-IR spectra isn't going to be much use unless you can try and match it up with a database of near-IR spectra of known materials.
If this can scan for carbs/sugars, this could be a real winner within the Diabetic community. I would love to be able to eat out and be able to scan my meal and know for sure how much insulin I should take.
Maybe this could even be used in conjunction with an insulin pump and some sort of sensor to determine the amount of food consumed and, BAM, artificial pancreas. (It's that easy! LOL)
Here are some links to background information, existing products, and applications of the underlying technology. They could be exaggerating the capabilities of their particular miniaturized sensor, but as far as I can tell they are not making up any new science. Spectroscopy is useful and widely used - but also occasionally oversold, so some skepticism is certainly warranted. The concrete applications they cite have been previously demonstrated (links below).
SCiO uses near-infrared spectroscopy (as clearly stated on the kickstarter page: "How does SCiO work").
There are products on the market that do what SCiO claims to do - in field conditions, but generally with a larger form-factor, and at much greater cost. For example:
My first reaction was : "That's amazing!!!". Indeed a very cool idea. A tiny spectrometer. I would be very much interesting in the details of the technology behind it and what kind of details it can find about the scanned objects.
[+] [-] rjdagost|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhouston|12 years ago|reply
It is probably very similar to how Ubisoft made Just Dance using the Wii controller. The Wii controller was really horrible in terms of what you could read from it (it had no clue what your body position was), but if you stored what measurements you got from people dancing properly you could score people against that. Basically there was enough degrees of freedom to identify decent dancing to a degree and if you hid what was actually going on people though it sort of worked. Although the Wii-based Just Dance is horrible compared to the XBox version that used the Kinetic.
The key is to hide the intermediate results and profile a lot of things using the same crap sensor and then do fuzzy matching between the bad results. This works if there is enough discernible degrees of freedom.
[+] [-] damian2000|12 years ago|reply
"SCiO is based on the age-old near-IR spectroscopy method."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy
[+] [-] Odysseas1970|12 years ago|reply
Odysseas
[+] [-] refurb|12 years ago|reply
- IR spectroscopy is one of several methods used together to determine the structure of a molecule. It's certainly not definitive by itself.
- Some functional groups in molecules will give very specific signals (1700 cm^-1 for carbonyl functional groups, C=O), but for a lot of other functional groups, you get very weak signals that can sometimes be hard to distinguish
- IR works pretty good for pure compounds, but when you start to measure mixtures, the overlapping signals can get very difficult to isolate and identify
- As rjdagost mentioned, taking a sensor out of the lab will lead to all sorts of issues. Any stray light will likely cause any readings to look like garbage
I could see this technology being useful to identify different types of plastic. You have a limited universe of possible materials along with some pretty specific functional groups that are either there or not.
To use it as a "molecule sensor for all", seems a big problem to try and tackle.
And how the hell does it determine the ripeness of a avocado through the skin?
[+] [-] ihnorton|12 years ago|reply
Some application examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699186
> And how the hell does it determine the ripeness of a avocado through the skin?
eg: http://ucanr.edu/datastoreFiles/234-347.pdf and http://www.aseanfood.info/Articles/13004404.pdf
[edit: removed LMGTFY link - sorry, that was rude. But please don't pull the expert card outside your area of expertise: NIR has been used to assess fruit ripeness for decades]
[+] [-] rjdagost|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ycui1986|12 years ago|reply
SCiO do not use typical IR spectroscopy. For near-IR typically, chemometrics (or let's say PCA) has to be used to get any type useful information from the result.
[+] [-] sytelus|12 years ago|reply
They say the device can detect materials of 1% concentration. But what kind of materials? Spectroscopy is hard, precise measurements are even harder.
Also why are they running $200K campaign? It seems they already have significant staff and $200K would be peanuts as a goal.
[+] [-] bhouston|12 years ago|reply
A lot of people use Kickstarter as a marketing means rather than a fundraising means. At least one of their cofounders is a VC thus I expect they already have VC funds or at least very significant angel funds.
[+] [-] ogoldberg|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://pando.com/2014/04/04/revealed-healbe-isnt-indiegogos-...
[2] http://pando.com/2014/04/30/consumer-physics-kickstarter-cam...
[+] [-] s_henry_paulson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idanman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|12 years ago|reply
Reality is that many such services inevitably go under, and then your device is useless. Especially when the service is as compute intensive as this one sounds.
[+] [-] pervycreeper|12 years ago|reply
Looks like you have to pay separately for each individual use case as well!
Hard to see how they will compete with the inevitable clones, unless they get really lucky with patents. The nickel-and-dime scheme is not only consumer unfriendly, but probably a strategic mistake.
[+] [-] djmdjm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emm|12 years ago|reply
In the past we used cloud features for offline tracking in AR applications because an iPhone 3GS wasn't capable of real time pose reconstruction. But today it seems more like a lock-in and a way to collect data. A quad-core cpu on a phone should do most tasks offline.
[+] [-] bhouston|12 years ago|reply
I think the reason for this is that the intermediate results are likely quite bad.
[+] [-] fredoliveira|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkimie2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanjshaw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisBob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtdewcmu|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dang|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flyinglizard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootuser|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|12 years ago|reply
Having said that, I'm not sure who the target market really is. It's basically a Cool Science Toy. Educational use? But in that case maybe it would be nice to show the raw data just to give an impression of how it works.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|12 years ago|reply
I'd personally be fine with cloud-based recognition if the database was open, free to copy and host locally.
That, and also not giving access to raw data pretty much kills 90% of possible uses for the devices, turning a cool piece of tech into another pretty much worthless gizmo.
[+] [-] nowlnowl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmyr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aurora72|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlakePetersen|12 years ago|reply
Maybe this could even be used in conjunction with an insulin pump and some sort of sensor to determine the amount of food consumed and, BAM, artificial pancreas. (It's that easy! LOL)
[+] [-] ihnorton|12 years ago|reply
SCiO uses near-infrared spectroscopy (as clearly stated on the kickstarter page: "How does SCiO work").
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy Scholarly review: http://www.odin.life.ku.dk/news_letters/Q2_Q3_2005/news001.p...
There are products on the market that do what SCiO claims to do - in field conditions, but generally with a larger form-factor, and at much greater cost. For example:
http://www.asdi.com/products/fieldspec-spectroradiometers/ha...
http://www.jdsu.com/ProductLiterature/micronir1700-spectrome...
http://www.bruker.com/products/infrared-near-infrared-and-ra...
http://www.ahurascientific.com/material-verification/product...
Some NIR application examples:
Agriculture, plants and soil quality assessment:
http://blog.cimmyt.org/pocket-sensors-for-precision-agricult... http://www.hindawi.com/journals/js/2012/582028/ http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf201468x http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/1/290 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016706112...
Agriculture, meat assessment:
http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12161-013-9611-y#p...
Drug molecular composition (and counterfeit detection):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18703302 http://irvinepharma.com/pdf/A_comparison_of_near_infrared_me... http://www.americanpharmaceuticalreview.com/Featured-Article...
Material characterization:
http://ssmon.chb.kth.se/vol17/1_Steiner.pdf
Remote sensing for agriculture (only giving one example here, but this is a huge field. look up "MODIS" or "terra and aqua satellite"): http://quantalab.ias.csic.es/pdf/130222_e-Informa1832.pdf
[+] [-] hershel|12 years ago|reply
And according to [1] they're backed by khosla ventures, which s a highly respectable VC firm. If that's true , that doesn't seem like scam.
[1]http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/29/scio-handheld-sensor-can-d...
[+] [-] warrenmar|12 years ago|reply
http://publiclab.org/wiki/spectrometer
[+] [-] jessaustin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Istof|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomphoolery|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unwind|12 years ago|reply
Basically trying to combine as many sensors as possible in a handheld form factor.
Also much more transparent as a project.
[+] [-] LukeB_UK|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidcool|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zarkonnen|12 years ago|reply