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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Could it be used to test if drugs are the genuine stuff?

That would be a great use case. And really, not even for the illegal stuff either. Is this an M&M or advil? How much and what isomer of caffeine is in this drink? Is there shellfish in this? Is that poison ivy?

I mean, really simple stuff for anyone to get hurt with chemically, things like this can help with. Maybe not the full functionality like we see on star trek. But, I'm sure people with allergies, ravers with molly, moms that want to know what is safe for their babies, etc can all have something that can help mitigate risk in some small way.

The right way to do that would be with FTIR or Raman spectroscopy, and this sensor is capable of neither.

At best, this is an ersatz replacement for the tunable filter on a hyperspectral imaging system. There are some advantages (off hand, acquisition rate is a big one) to a more diverse mosaic filter, but other than in using QDs as the actual filter medium, this idea is not at all new.

Meh, it's a use case scenario. When the differences in the materials you are testing for are so large, the sensor can make a pretty good bet for you. Take the case of; Is this Tylenol or a Skittle. Acetaminophen and fructose are very different and you can test for that pretty simply. To get very accurate readings you need a much more powerful pulse laser as the source, ture, but mose people don't need that. You can get 80% of the use cases with 20% of the 'tech', I think that's a great reason to stick one in every phone you can.

I'm not a big FTIR person, but at least for Raman, laser power is far less important than the linewidth (and you definitely don't need a pulsed laser) and the rest of the optical engine. I'm actually pretty bearish across the board on these consumer spectroscopy products mostly due to the importance of sample prep. Your use case statement is correct, distinguishing paracetamol from candy should be easy, but is really that a common need or a novelty? It seems to be the latter to me.

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