Science in my pocket.

It seems that I can be fairly accused of not keeping up with what's going on out there. A few months ago, I posted on the slowly developing trend to taking advantage of the advantages that smart mobile phones offered in being able to be used as highly portable scientific instruments. Recently, a friend alerted me to a Kickstarter funding project which is set to take this concept to a much higher level. An Israeli company called Consumer Physics has been working away on a miniature NIR (Near Infra Red) analyzer for the past couple of years, and has targeted the beginning of 2015 for release of their SCIO instrument. 

The ultimate idea is that you would point it at an object, and it will give you its chemical analysis. Of course, nothing in life is easy, and NIR is no exception. NIR has been around for decades, but the availability of cheap, powerful computers to run the software to process the complex signals coming from NIR instrumentation (and thereby yield useful results) has increased popularity in recent years. 

When NIR light is directed at an object, chemical components of that object reflect or absorb various wavelengths of that light in varying amounts. That reflected light comprises a spectrum, which is analyzed by a spectrometer contained in the handpiece. The signal from the spectrometer is sent via Bluetooth to the smart phone, where the software compares the spectrum to those analyzed previously from similar samples for which the chemical analysis is known. The accuracy of NIR analysis is dependent on a number of factors which include:

- the accuracy of the chemical analysis of the components contained in the calibration samples

- the condition of the calibration samples (how they were prepared and presented for NIR analysis)

- the similarity of the samples under test to those used for the calibration

- the condition and similarity of the surface of the object, compared to those used for the calibration

- sophistication and relevance of the algorithms used to deconstruct and quantify the spectra.

So the SCIO NIR instrument doesn't yet rival the "Tricorder" used to analyze absolutely everything in Star Trek episodes, but if the project is realized as conceived by the developer, it will (in my opinion) represent the greatest advance to date in the development of portable chemical analyzers.

Aside from the brilliance in condensing a laboratory-sized instrument to a device seeming no larger than modern electronic car "keys", to me, the stand out features are the complete liberation of the sensor and the inspired use of the Cloud to refine computation algorithms as new data is logged. No longer is the sensor attached to the signal conversion and display device by a restricting cable. It is now truly and completely wireless. Every dedicated analyzer with a sensor bound to it by a length of cable is now obsolete.

As I've said before, exciting times ahead!

-