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from the that-much-closer-to-a-tricorder dept.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11022/scio-sensor-added-to-smartphone
I first saw Consumer Physics' SCiO handheld scanner a couple of years ago and was impressed by its ability to identify materials by scanning and analyzing their chemical composition. In the intervening years, Consumer Physics has partnered with Analog Devices to increase the sensor's accuracy and reduce its size, and at CES 2017, the company announced the first smartphone with an integrated SCiO sensor, making this technology even easier to carry and use.
[...] The SCiO sensor uses near-infrared spectroscopy to identify a material's molecular content. By illuminating an object with a broadband light source and using the spectrometer, a type of optical sensor, to break the reflected light into its constituent components, SCiO's signal processing algorithms compare the reflected light's wavelengths to the original emission to create a spectral fingerprint. This technique works because molecules will only absorb photons at certain energy levels, which means specific wavelengths will be missing or attenuated in the reflected light.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 13 2017, @01:56PM
No, I THINK NOT.
Here is the new video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaQBCXojNJo [youtube.com]
Here's an older one where they ID Advil, Ibuprofen on stage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtT7dsWb3ng [youtube.com]
I think there is another one where they point it as whiskey and it breaks down the composition of it. Not sure if that was a mockup or real.
Anyway, this technology seems far more capable than you give it credit for.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 13 2017, @06:08PM
The stuff I worked with was also quite impressive in demonstrations - behind the scenes where you saw how little difference there was between compound A and compound B - as compared to the noise floor, that's where my skepticism comes from.
Conventional mass spectrometers that vaporize a sample, charge it and feed it through a magnetic field - those are pretty impressive (though not as impressive as crime shows make them out to be in the fictional forensics labs.) Ultrasensitive (14+bits per channel) multispectral cameras can do some shockingly impressive things like take your pulse rate from the color changes in your skin from across the room. Reflective IR spectroscopy is more of the same, more resolution than we're accustomed to, over a wider color gamut, but, basically, they are identifying materials by their color. I can't help but think of all the chemical compounds that are identified a "presents as a grainy white powder" - adding some additional spectral analysis bands beyond RGB improves that situation, but it does not make it miraculously better for all things.
🌻🌻 [google.com]