7 ms·

Taking the SCiO Food Analyzer Grocery Shopping

95 points by arm 10y ago

abledon 10y ago
Awesome! I can see hobbyists buying some of these then setting up online review hubs for each city, labelling the quality of produce in each store / farmer's market produce section when they go out on their 'measurement' excursions.
- dekhn 10y ago
  except the values will change from day to day as providers change their source mixes. nobody really cares what the exact sugar or protein content of their fruits is. It doesn't correlate with "quality".
  - LyndsySimon 10y ago
    > nobody really cares what the exact sugar or protein content of their fruits is I disagree here - as someone on a ketogenic diet, the sugar content of food is extremely important to me. Labelling standards are abysmal, too; it's legal to market something as "0g carbohydrates" if there is less than a 0.5g carbs per serving. Considering that serving sizes can be very small, that can be extremely misleading. For instance - a bag of pork rinds may be listed as 0g carbs, even going so far as marketing that fact on the front of the bag, while the third ingredient by weight is sugar. If the bag claims that there are 20 servings, then the only real information you have is that there are less than 10g of carbs in the bag. When you're on a diet that limits you to 20g per day, that's a huge problem.
    - dekhn 10y ago
      This device does not have the accuracy to provide you with the information you need.
anotheryou 10y ago
haha, funny layout on big screens: 3/4 of page filled with other articles.
- interlocutor2 10y ago
  Yep, perfect use case for 'Click to Remove Element' extension.
endorphone 10y ago
I am deeply skeptical of this product and find it bizarre that the IEEE would have an article with so little regiment -- basically a hyped up PR piece. Why wouldn't the author use the device themselves, without someone with a profound bias controlling the show?
- codewaffle 10y ago
  The only solid info I seemed to get out of this article, is that it's a sugar-content analyzer paired with a food database.
  - tcskeptic 10y ago
    It's not a sugar-content analyzer -- though it can do that. It is a consumer grade NIR spectroscope that pairs with a smart phone. Whether that will prove to be useful or not is up for debate but the capability for consumers seems truly novel to me.
dekhn 10y ago
This article is damning the product with faint praise. It's basically worthless for the purpose they use it.
LyndsySimon 10y ago
> While the initial applications surround food, Sharon says that the technology is not just for checking out food freshness and nutritional information; it’s good at analyzing body fat, and distinguishing real pharmaceuticals from their fake counterparts. “We’ve done a demo that distinguishes real Viagra from fake Viagra,” says Sharon. “That’s the most commonly counterfeited drug.” Now that's interesting. I wonder if they've considered marketing it as a way of testing the purity of illegal drugs?
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  Mentioning illegal drugs sounds always like a shady money grab is coming up. However, that's where this could truly safe lives.
- xkcd-sucks 10y ago
  It could also be good for cosmetics, as they're heterogeneous and probably pretty consistent. Although it would be limited to checking brand authenticity rather than interrogating composition
- cr0sh 10y ago
  Or perhaps testing strains of mj (in the "legal" states - medical and otherwise) for potency or whatnot?
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  > The user starts out by simplifying the problem a bit by identifying the category of the item to be examined—it’s not “What fruit is this,” but, “This is an apple, is it any good?” Consumer Physics’ cloud-based software then taps into its knowledge base, for an apple, it defines “good” as “sweet” (hence the Brix measurement), and considers an apple’s typical range of sweetness based on thousands of scans. A graphic on the phone then places the apple on a quality range. The important data and algorithms are held in their servers, not in the phone app. This gives them a lot of control and responsibility over the models, leading me to believe that they wouldn't store data on illegal drugs. I also feel it's kind of scummy to keep this on the server. There is no reason that this functionality couldn't be offline and on the phone, except to let them charge you monthly for the hardware you're effectively leasing from them, rather than letting you use the device you own. Also, I expect if this does take off that someone will replace their app's phone home behavior and sever-side components with an equivalent on localhost. Slightly later will be the cloned scanners that plug into the app. They should focus on providing higher-quality and higher-accuracy scanners than competition can achieve, rather than trying to lock out competitors.
wmblaettler 10y ago
While initially skeptical myself, I found a bit of information on Consumer Physics' site stating that they use near-infrared spectroscopy. Doing a little initial research, it seems plausible that they could glean a number of useful traits from agricultural products, including soluble solids (i.e. sugar content in fruits), acidity, moisture content and more. https://www.consumerphysics.com/myscio/technology/ https://www.consumerphysics.com/myscio/technology/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy#Agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy#Agr... http://www.intechopen.com/books/developments-in-near-infrared-spectroscopy/using-near-infrared-spectroscopy-in-agricultural-systems http://www.intechopen.com/books/developments-in-near-infrare...
- endorphone 10y ago
  NIR could give information about the scanned surface, though in this case it's apparently a low quality/low signal NIR sensor. For this app it was originally pitched as a magic device that could identify anything, but in the shipped product you not only have to tell it the category of item you're scanning, in many cases it gives very little information (e.g. doesn't identify an orange as an orange), and that information seems highly suspect and of questionable accuracy regardless. Everything about this campaign has been dubious. One of the first videos of an "unboxing" was a close friend of the creator who, after deleting his video, went around posting comments about how it was just "good fun" and "innovation takes years", etc. Every demo of the product is a staged example of very low hanging fruit, pardon the pun. The actual utility of this device seems deeply suspect.
- crispyambulance 10y ago
  Of course its all "plausible" and we all yearn for a Star Trek Tricoder, but spectrometer measurements have to be taken under controlled conditions with careful calibration or else you're going to get garbage-in/garbage-out. That said, it sounds like harmless fun. But if you really care about accuracy, its not that hard to assess the quality of fruit and vegetables with your own senses, don't need a spectrometer/iphone contraption.
aaronharnly 10y ago
The article says "Consumers in China, Sharon points out, are particularly interested in checking food safety, given the history of problems with the food supply." Is there any reason to think that the most common problems with food safety would be detectable with this sensor? I don't doubt it's possible there could be some correlation, but it seems like a big leap from estimating carbohydrate content to detecting food-borne illness or contamination. A quick google turns up this comment[1] (of uncertain reliability!) saying most food safety issues are caused by toxic animals or plants, pathogenic microorganisms, or chemical contamination. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4500434/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4500434/
- xkcd-sucks 10y ago
  Most nasty stuff is present in vanishingly small quantities compared to all the other crap in biomaterial, which is why most contaminant testing involves an extraction step, or even extraction+fractionation, before spectrometry. Somewhat relatedly, inorganic ions don't have nir activity, only their complexes with organic counterions have nir activity. And there are like a gazillion different things that complex with lead/mercury/etc. in unpurified biomaterial, so direct nir measurements of a sample are not a productive approach. That being said, it would certainly be a big moneymaker if placebo contaminant detectors became a thing with Chinese consumers like surgical masks for smog
diimdeep 10y ago
I think most vegetables covered in some protective layer, they don't even smell. You have to cut them open to properly use spectrometer in that case you can just taste them.
xkcd-sucks 10y ago
A few problems with scio: - It's reading from (mostly) the surface, not the bulk mass. Not great for heterogeneous things like pills - It uses machine learning models on 10-datapoint IR reflectance spectra, meaning it's only useful in a trained regime. It doesn't give information about composition, but instead classifies a sample as a member of a pretty constrained population. So a mystery substance that can't be roughly identified ('vegetable', 'pill' etc) can't be scanned, etc. If nobody's built a model for the thing you're scanning and for the property you want to evaluate, then you're out of luck - So, evaluating drugs ("we can distinguish fake from real viagra") is done by looking at the surface coating which typically has no active ingredients (and even if there were, the signal would be washed out by inactive ingredients). The model is basically trained on 10-100 scans of a presumed good viagra pill, or maybe 10-100 different good viagra pills if they felt like it - Building models requires purchase of a $250 license in addition to the $250 hardware, which is just ridiculous. Of course they're doing the calculations on their servers, but it still seems really scammy, hostile to developers, and counterproductive to launching an ecosystem of scanning models. The useless 10-point IR "spectra" notwithstanding, I would totally buy one of these if you could use open data and open models supported by a public community.
- dancsi 10y ago
  As for the last point, you are right, they are purposefully sending encrypted/encoded(?) data to your phone, which is then sent to their server. The raw spectrum will only be returned from the server if you have an even more expensive "researcher" account...
  - xkcd-sucks 10y ago
    One might assume their business model involves collecting lots of data + using it to build their own in-house models for sale to corporations, or just selling it raw?
- trendia 10y ago
  So, if the drug has a time-release coating (which many do) it's probably not going to work.
annnnd 10y ago
Interesting, though I fear if this becomes mainstream, the producers will just optimize food for good readings. Does that mean good food? I would bet not. It's the same as with roses which nowadays look beautiful, but smell like - nothing. Unless they put a drop of perfume on it (which they sometimes do).
- xeromal 10y ago
  I read about Red Delicious apples a while back. Everyone I've met hates them so why do they have such a bold name? Turns out back in the day they were delicious, but farmers have aimed towards making larger and redder apples at the expense of taste so now we have beautiful red delicious apples that taste like ass and have the texture of apple sauce.
- martalist 10y ago
  My concern is that this will lead to increased food waste, ie. retailers rejecting perfectly edible foods that don't scan well. That's already enough of an issue with irregular shaped produce.
leecarraher 10y ago
this article is worthless "I can’t verify the accuracy of what I was seeing" ... "But it certainly seemed real" when did the ieee become a clickbait, advertisement machine.
- OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago
  Exactly my thought as well. Hacker news isn't very discerning with this one.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hgchoi 10y ago
There is another alternative that looks like more of a solid tool. www.nanolambda.net anyhow spectral sensing could be one of the main stream for IoT sensing
hgchoi 10y ago
There is another one that looks like more of a solid tool. www.nanolambda.net anyhow spectral sensing could be one of the main stream for IoT sensing

95 points by arm 10y ago

Awesome! I can see hobbyists buying some of these then setting up online review hubs for each city, labelling the quality of produce in each store / farmer's market produce section when they go out on their 'measurement' excursions.

dekhn 10y ago
except the values will change from day to day as providers change their source mixes. nobody really cares what the exact sugar or protein content of their fruits is. It doesn't correlate with "quality".
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  > nobody really cares what the exact sugar or protein content of their fruits is I disagree here - as someone on a ketogenic diet, the sugar content of food is extremely important to me. Labelling standards are abysmal, too; it's legal to market something as "0g carbohydrates" if there is less than a 0.5g carbs per serving. Considering that serving sizes can be very small, that can be extremely misleading. For instance - a bag of pork rinds may be listed as 0g carbs, even going so far as marketing that fact on the front of the bag, while the third ingredient by weight is sugar. If the bag claims that there are 20 servings, then the only real information you have is that there are less than 10g of carbs in the bag. When you're on a diet that limits you to 20g per day, that's a huge problem.
  - dekhn 10y ago
    This device does not have the accuracy to provide you with the information you need.

anotheryou 10y ago

haha, funny layout on big screens: 3/4 of page filled with other articles.

interlocutor2 10y ago
Yep, perfect use case for 'Click to Remove Element' extension.

endorphone 10y ago

I am deeply skeptical of this product and find it bizarre that the IEEE would have an article with so little regiment -- basically a hyped up PR piece. Why wouldn't the author use the device themselves, without someone with a profound bias controlling the show?

codewaffle 10y ago
The only solid info I seemed to get out of this article, is that it's a sugar-content analyzer paired with a food database.
- tcskeptic 10y ago
  It's not a sugar-content analyzer -- though it can do that. It is a consumer grade NIR spectroscope that pairs with a smart phone. Whether that will prove to be useful or not is up for debate but the capability for consumers seems truly novel to me.

dekhn 10y ago

This article is damning the product with faint praise. It's basically worthless for the purpose they use it.

LyndsySimon 10y ago

> While the initial applications surround food, Sharon says that the technology is not just for checking out food freshness and nutritional information; it’s good at analyzing body fat, and distinguishing real pharmaceuticals from their fake counterparts. “We’ve done a demo that distinguishes real Viagra from fake Viagra,” says Sharon. “That’s the most commonly counterfeited drug.” Now that's interesting. I wonder if they've considered marketing it as a way of testing the purity of illegal drugs?

ajmurmann 10y ago
Mentioning illegal drugs sounds always like a shady money grab is coming up. However, that's where this could truly safe lives.
xkcd-sucks 10y ago
It could also be good for cosmetics, as they're heterogeneous and probably pretty consistent. Although it would be limited to checking brand authenticity rather than interrogating composition
cr0sh 10y ago
Or perhaps testing strains of mj (in the "legal" states - medical and otherwise) for potency or whatnot?
LeifCarrotson 10y ago
> The user starts out by simplifying the problem a bit by identifying the category of the item to be examined—it’s not “What fruit is this,” but, “This is an apple, is it any good?” Consumer Physics’ cloud-based software then taps into its knowledge base, for an apple, it defines “good” as “sweet” (hence the Brix measurement), and considers an apple’s typical range of sweetness based on thousands of scans. A graphic on the phone then places the apple on a quality range. The important data and algorithms are held in their servers, not in the phone app. This gives them a lot of control and responsibility over the models, leading me to believe that they wouldn't store data on illegal drugs. I also feel it's kind of scummy to keep this on the server. There is no reason that this functionality couldn't be offline and on the phone, except to let them charge you monthly for the hardware you're effectively leasing from them, rather than letting you use the device you own. Also, I expect if this does take off that someone will replace their app's phone home behavior and sever-side components with an equivalent on localhost. Slightly later will be the cloned scanners that plug into the app. They should focus on providing higher-quality and higher-accuracy scanners than competition can achieve, rather than trying to lock out competitors.

wmblaettler 10y ago

While initially skeptical myself, I found a bit of information on Consumer Physics' site stating that they use near-infrared spectroscopy. Doing a little initial research, it seems plausible that they could glean a number of useful traits from agricultural products, including soluble solids (i.e. sugar content in fruits), acidity, moisture content and more. https://www.consumerphysics.com/myscio/technology/ https://www.consumerphysics.com/myscio/technology/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy#Agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy#Agr... http://www.intechopen.com/books/developments-in-near-infrared-spectroscopy/using-near-infrared-spectroscopy-in-agricultural-systems http://www.intechopen.com/books/developments-in-near-infrare...

endorphone 10y ago
NIR could give information about the scanned surface, though in this case it's apparently a low quality/low signal NIR sensor. For this app it was originally pitched as a magic device that could identify anything, but in the shipped product you not only have to tell it the category of item you're scanning, in many cases it gives very little information (e.g. doesn't identify an orange as an orange), and that information seems highly suspect and of questionable accuracy regardless. Everything about this campaign has been dubious. One of the first videos of an "unboxing" was a close friend of the creator who, after deleting his video, went around posting comments about how it was just "good fun" and "innovation takes years", etc. Every demo of the product is a staged example of very low hanging fruit, pardon the pun. The actual utility of this device seems deeply suspect.
crispyambulance 10y ago
Of course its all "plausible" and we all yearn for a Star Trek Tricoder, but spectrometer measurements have to be taken under controlled conditions with careful calibration or else you're going to get garbage-in/garbage-out. That said, it sounds like harmless fun. But if you really care about accuracy, its not that hard to assess the quality of fruit and vegetables with your own senses, don't need a spectrometer/iphone contraption.

aaronharnly 10y ago

The article says "Consumers in China, Sharon points out, are particularly interested in checking food safety, given the history of problems with the food supply." Is there any reason to think that the most common problems with food safety would be detectable with this sensor? I don't doubt it's possible there could be some correlation, but it seems like a big leap from estimating carbohydrate content to detecting food-borne illness or contamination. A quick google turns up this comment[1] (of uncertain reliability!) saying most food safety issues are caused by toxic animals or plants, pathogenic microorganisms, or chemical contamination. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4500434/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4500434/

xkcd-sucks 10y ago
Most nasty stuff is present in vanishingly small quantities compared to all the other crap in biomaterial, which is why most contaminant testing involves an extraction step, or even extraction+fractionation, before spectrometry. Somewhat relatedly, inorganic ions don't have nir activity, only their complexes with organic counterions have nir activity. And there are like a gazillion different things that complex with lead/mercury/etc. in unpurified biomaterial, so direct nir measurements of a sample are not a productive approach. That being said, it would certainly be a big moneymaker if placebo contaminant detectors became a thing with Chinese consumers like surgical masks for smog

diimdeep 10y ago

I think most vegetables covered in some protective layer, they don't even smell. You have to cut them open to properly use spectrometer in that case you can just taste them.

xkcd-sucks 10y ago

A few problems with scio: - It's reading from (mostly) the surface, not the bulk mass. Not great for heterogeneous things like pills - It uses machine learning models on 10-datapoint IR reflectance spectra, meaning it's only useful in a trained regime. It doesn't give information about composition, but instead classifies a sample as a member of a pretty constrained population. So a mystery substance that can't be roughly identified ('vegetable', 'pill' etc) can't be scanned, etc. If nobody's built a model for the thing you're scanning and for the property you want to evaluate, then you're out of luck - So, evaluating drugs ("we can distinguish fake from real viagra") is done by looking at the surface coating which typically has no active ingredients (and even if there were, the signal would be washed out by inactive ingredients). The model is basically trained on 10-100 scans of a presumed good viagra pill, or maybe 10-100 different good viagra pills if they felt like it - Building models requires purchase of a $250 license in addition to the $250 hardware, which is just ridiculous. Of course they're doing the calculations on their servers, but it still seems really scammy, hostile to developers, and counterproductive to launching an ecosystem of scanning models. The useless 10-point IR "spectra" notwithstanding, I would totally buy one of these if you could use open data and open models supported by a public community.

dancsi 10y ago
As for the last point, you are right, they are purposefully sending encrypted/encoded(?) data to your phone, which is then sent to their server. The raw spectrum will only be returned from the server if you have an even more expensive "researcher" account...
- xkcd-sucks 10y ago
  One might assume their business model involves collecting lots of data + using it to build their own in-house models for sale to corporations, or just selling it raw?
trendia 10y ago
So, if the drug has a time-release coating (which many do) it's probably not going to work.

annnnd 10y ago

Interesting, though I fear if this becomes mainstream, the producers will just optimize food for good readings. Does that mean good food? I would bet not. It's the same as with roses which nowadays look beautiful, but smell like - nothing. Unless they put a drop of perfume on it (which they sometimes do).

xeromal 10y ago
I read about Red Delicious apples a while back. Everyone I've met hates them so why do they have such a bold name? Turns out back in the day they were delicious, but farmers have aimed towards making larger and redder apples at the expense of taste so now we have beautiful red delicious apples that taste like ass and have the texture of apple sauce.
martalist 10y ago
My concern is that this will lead to increased food waste, ie. retailers rejecting perfectly edible foods that don't scan well. That's already enough of an issue with irregular shaped produce.

leecarraher 10y ago

this article is worthless "I can’t verify the accuracy of what I was seeing" ... "But it certainly seemed real" when did the ieee become a clickbait, advertisement machine.

OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago
Exactly my thought as well. Hacker news isn't very discerning with this one.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hgchoi 10y ago

There is another alternative that looks like more of a solid tool. www.nanolambda.net anyhow spectral sensing could be one of the main stream for IoT sensing

hgchoi 10y ago

There is another one that looks like more of a solid tool. www.nanolambda.net anyhow spectral sensing could be one of the main stream for IoT sensing