Here are some links to background information, existing products, and applications of the underlying technology. They could be exaggerating the capabilities of their particular miniaturized sensor, but as far as I can tell they are not making up any new science. Spectroscopy is useful and widely used - but also occasionally oversold, so some skepticism is certainly warranted. The concrete applications they cite have been previously demonstrated (links below).

SCiO uses near-infrared spectroscopy (as clearly stated on the kickstarter page: "How does SCiO work").

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy Scholarly review: http://www.odin.life.ku.dk/news_letters/Q2_Q3_2005/news001.p...

There are products on the market that do what SCiO claims to do - in field conditions, but generally with a larger form-factor, and at much greater cost. For example:

http://www.asdi.com/products/fieldspec-spectroradiometers/ha...

http://www.jdsu.com/ProductLiterature/micronir1700-spectrome...

http://www.bruker.com/products/infrared-near-infrared-and-ra...

http://www.ahurascientific.com/material-verification/product...

Some NIR application examples:

Agriculture, plants and soil quality assessment:

http://blog.cimmyt.org/pocket-sensors-for-precision-agricult... http://www.hindawi.com/journals/js/2012/582028/ http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf201468x http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/1/290 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016706112...

Agriculture, meat assessment:

http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12161-013-9611-y#p...

Drug molecular composition (and counterfeit detection):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18703302 http://irvinepharma.com/pdf/A_comparison_of_near_infrared_me... http://www.americanpharmaceuticalreview.com/Featured-Article...

Material characterization:

http://ssmon.chb.kth.se/vol17/1_Steiner.pdf

Remote sensing for agriculture (only giving one example here, but this is a huge field. look up "MODIS" or "terra and aqua satellite"): http://quantalab.ias.csic.es/pdf/130222_e-Informa1832.pdf