Food scanner in making: An information source to know what your food contains

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Food scanner in making: An information source to know what your food contains

– Reported, December 26  2013

 

TellSpec is in the process to create a Food scanner that may enable it’s user to know what is your food. The device ‘TellSpec’, developed in Toronto, can simply be pointed at a food item, to identify what’s in it. This handheld food scanner shall connect to your smartphone to inform you about allergens, chemicals, nutrients and calories present in any food item.

When you beam the low-powered laser in the TellSpec scanner at a food product, some of the photons in the light are absorbed, which raises the energy states of the molecules in the food. Lower energy photons are then emitted back. The spectrometer inside the TellSpec scanner sorts these photons by wavelength and counts them. The resulting numbers, called a spectrum, describe the chemical compounds in the food. This spectrum is uploaded to TellSpecs analysis engine where its analyzed and correlated with other reference spectra. Information about the allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories, and ingredients in the food is then downloaded and displayed on your smart phone.

You want to know whats in your food before you buy it, before you order it, and before you eat it because the quality of your health depends on what you eat. Many foods contain chemicals and allergens that you want to avoid, but it can be difficult to know whether these chemicals and allergens are in your food or not. How can you tell if your food contains the nutrients you need? What about things like sodium or trans fats that you might be trying to avoid? Food labels can give us some information if theyre available, but they are not always intelligible and some ingredients may not even be reported. TellSpec tells you the allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories, and ingredients in your food before you buy it, order it, or eat it.

TellSpec brings together laser spectroscopy, nanophotonics, and a unique mathematical algorithm in a revolutionary hand-held consumer device that can analyze the chemical composition of any food in less than 20 seconds.

The TellSpec handheld device beams a low-powered laser at the food you wish to analyze, measures the reflected light with a spectrometer, and sends the data via your smart phone, computer, or tablet to TellSpecs servers in the cloud. Those servers use this data to deduce information about your food that is of interest to you. This information is then displayed on your computer, tablet or smart phone so you can intelligently decide if you want to buy or eat the food.

The handheld scanner is a Raman spectrometer. The low-powered laser inside the scanner emits a beam through the front window. Light emitted from the sample is then collected through a filter in the same window. This light then passes through a diffraction grating that disperses the light onto an image sensor, which converts it into an electrical signal that is then digitized.

Until recently, a large and expensive industrial spectrometer was needed to gather spectra of adequate resolution and signal strength, but miniaturization of optical devices, and a new and powerful method of analyzing weaker signals of lower resolution, have enabled the manufacture of suitable tiny inexpensive spectrometers.

The digital spectrum of the food from the scanner is transmitted to the TellSpec analysis engine which processes it, compares it to reference spectra, and runs a learning algorithm on it. The output is interpreted through a large database, and information about the food is selected and customized for the user, downloaded, and displayed to the user.

Official website of the company is located at http://tellspec.com

 

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