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Comment by rjdagost | Hacker News Reader

One of the proposed use cases of the SCiO is pharmaceutical identification. Consumer Physics needs to be EXTREMELY careful with marketing this use. I would actually discourage this type of application if I were them.

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I was interested to see them use a Bayer Aspirin in their demo. Aspirin is -- or was (my pharmaceutical formulation training is nearly three decades out of date) almost unique in being one of the few drugs that has the perfect powder flow, binding, and dispersal characteristics to pressure-form into tablets using a tablet punch machine without any other binders, lubricants, bursting agents, or other ingredients. Back when I was studying the topic, an aspirin tablet was generally just that -- powdered acetyl salicylate compressed into a tablet shape.

If this thing can correctly identify an enteric-coated or other sustained-release pharmaceutical formulation other than by checking a muddy absorption curve against a database of known samples I'll eat my hat.

Also: the app they used purported to identify tablets by their manufacturer brand? Ahem: WTF? This does indeed look like it's just throwing a spectrum at a database of samples and looking for the closest match. Which is hardly going to weed out some of the better counterfeits on the [black] market ...

Not to mention that it supposedly can tell you how many grams of sugar are in something, or what "percentage of water" is in an apple? No, there's no way you could do that with spectroscopy. Say you have an apricot, you measure it with the device, and it indeed says it's an apricot. Apricots are not all the same, the "CandyCot" apricot has about 2x to 3x the sugar content of other apricots. There's no way they could check the DNA of the plant and determine specifically what kind of apricot it was, unless perhaps you were to isolate the dna and change the setting on the device to 'DNA' and you had a database of the characteristics of different Apricot DNA.

This is inaccurate; water content is one of the easiest things to measure with near-infrared spectroscopy, and NIR has enough penetrance to be useful even for fruits with fairly tough skins (eg avocados, see last link below)

There are multiple commercial manufacturers selling NIR sensors for fruit quality control:

http://www.moisttech.com/

http://www.ndc.com/en/Products/On-Line-NIR-Gauges.aspx

Research articles: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3673116/ http://www.cropj.com/miraee_4_3_2010_175_179.pdf http://www.brimrose.com/pdfandwordfiles/I_GRASA-CSIC.pdf http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/36050.pdf (avocados)

Sure, but for sugar you need to measure refraction not absorption.

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