having built the system and analysis method behind an absorption photospectroscopy (IR/VIS/UV) based device to measure a specific set of rigorously prepared and filtered bio-analytes, i would strongly advise against accepting this devices claims. Spectroscopy is a wonderful tool, but it's not a new one, and far more sophisticated machines have tried and failed at this consumer level device's claims. caveat emptor.

Can you be more specific? What claims are unrealistic? What do you think are good consumer applications for photo spectroscopy?

they give examples of alcohol in beer and sugar content of foods.

experimental specific:

alcohol lies in the vis spectra near what we would call yellow. beer is often yellow, but not due to its alcohol content. beer is yellow because of the malt used in it's creation. reflective vis. spec. cannot differentiate the two, and would always give a vastly false reading.

practical specific:

Glucose lies in the near ir (and has been known to for a long time), so this device could theoretically be used measure glucose levels in diabetic patients. a potentially multi billion dollar industry. So why would we worry about trivial things like sugar content in food (that could be obtained from reading the food's label), if we could instead be helping millions of people and making tons of money while doing it?

...Simply because it doesn't work well.

Sugar, in wine is often assessed transparently (absorption spectra, as reflectance is quite difficult to get clear signals due to surface shape, and air surface interface on incidence angles etc...) via polarization spectroscopy. there is visible spectroscopy, mass spectroscopy perpetrated spectroscopy... this does one, and in a narrow RF range. And in our studies and research, isolating one spectral signal from another was extremely difficult and required an enormous catalog of known solution variants to build our model. This doesn't even mention the technological issues of calibrating, and certifying light sources, varying saturation time of your ccd array, warming up a light source (LED is a weak spectroscopy source as it is designed specifically to be narrow band).

these things come out once every few years and almost always fall flat. I'm sure kickstarter is littered with these things.

One use: Could be used with things that have reagents added to expose the analyte more clearly, and then to assess the degree that analyte presents itself using the before reagent added as a baseline.

Also worth checking out, the $10 Open Source spectrometer that attaches to your phone.

http://store.publiclab.org/products/foldable-mini-spectromet...

The challenge seems to be to understand how to interpret the results. SpectralWorkbench.org is place that folks are sharing scans and comparing.

http://spectralworkbench.org/

I could see something like this being very useful for preventing deaths due to contaminated party drugs. If it works.

Raman spectroscopy is used in pharma manufacturing and law enforcement to inspect pharma evidence in the field, but compact Raman spectrometers are a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive than this consumer device. Also, you really need an analytical chemist to interpret the data. Raman is hard.

NIR spectroscopy, which is what this product uses, isn't very sensitive and wouldn't be a good choice to look for trace contaminants even on quality instrumentation.

That's not the sort of test you'll be able to do with this device. Pills tend to be opaque for one, and the contamination may very well be too small to detect anyway.

I agree that this device wouldn't work for that assay, but the opacity of the pills isn't a factor: the optical bench is too small and the illumination will be too low to do anything worthwhile.

What about: handedness of the molecules, variations in density (the surface of pills tends to be compressed)?

You're right that chirality is important and this thing isn't able to probe that. As to what I'll broadly call "sample prep", you're right again to point out how that is a critical consideration. So you're double right. Operating in NIR does give deeper penetration, which is one of the reasons to consider NIR spectroscopy in an application; I'd guess that this thing operates somewhere in the 700–900nm range, but I admittedly don't know what kind of interrogation volume that gives for a pill.

So, I'm wrong to casually dismiss opacity of the target. That stems from a bias due to a background in instrumentation (meaning, I start my thinking there). I think I'm still right though to think that instrumentation is a bigger problem than sample prep for this device, which I didn't do a good job in stating earlier.

Fair enough. And I should have done a (much) better job at indicating why I thought this instrument would not be suitable.

if I understood correctly it works with surface light reflection near IR spectrum, which is fine for certain set of food, and useless for many others. Anything that has different structure inside compared to surface will give only partial results (from apples to chocolate coating to ... well you get the point).

It sounds like what the Vessyl was trying to do and has failed miserably, as evidenced from repeated delays.

from [the store](https://www.consumerphysics.com/myscio/order):

$249/ $449 for the dev kit.

> Expected shipping date: March 2016

Sadly, no mention of (F)OSS anywhere on the site.

Check out http://store.publiclab.org/products/foldable-mini-spectromet... and http://spectralworkbench.org/

Really hoping this is legit and the crowdsourcing of samples provides more accuracy! This would have a significant change on the future of the world more quickly than most.