It says for all, but not everyone is going to want to shell out $300 for one of these.
SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All
#42For several years I worked in spectroscopy. It's REALLY tough to take a sensor out of a controlled lab and into the uncontrolled real world and get clear, unambiguous results like this video shows. Usually the absorption signal you're trying to measure is tiny compared to changes due to background fluctuations, etc. Things tend to only work well for special types of materials that have very distinct absorption proper…
It mentions this ..
"SCiO is based on the age-old near-IR spectroscopy method."
Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second that! It's an unnecessary date of expiry for hardware. You see that in every fitness armband and more and more apps. In two years ahead it could end up as a useless piece of electronics. In the past we used cloud features for offline tracking in AR applications because an iPhone 3GS wasn't capable of real time pose reconstruction. But today it seems more like a lock-in and a way to collect data. A quad-core…
"In two years ahead it could end up as a useless piece of electronics." I would argue your point is moot. How old is the average, working smartphone? When did you replace your desktop, your flat screen?
Not every piece of hardware has to be replaced every 12-24 months. How often do you upgrade your digital thermometer? Your blood pressure monitor?
Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All
#44There doesn't seem to be any mention of what exactly new technology is this. I would expect all the patents filed at this stage and this information be public - unless there is something fishy or they are going trade-secret route which would be very difficult. They say the device can detect materials of 1% concentration. But what kind of materials? Spectroscopy is hard, precise measurements are even harder. Also why…
> Also why are they running $200K campaign? It seems they already have significant staff and $200K would be peanuts as a goal.
A lot of people use Kickstarter as a marketing means rather than a fundraising means. At least one of their cofounders is a VC thus I expect they already have VC funds or at least very significant angel funds.
Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All
#45Hm, this is at best utterly misleading and at worst a scam.
I know one of their employees, she's a very close friend. I know nothing of their technology and nothing of the field, but I'm sure it's not a scam.
Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All
#46There doesn't seem to be any mention of what exactly new technology is this. I would expect all the patents filed at this stage and this information be public - unless there is something fishy or they are going trade-secret route which would be very difficult. They say the device can detect materials of 1% concentration. But what kind of materials? Spectroscopy is hard, precise measurements are even harder. Also why…
I managed to come upon a couple interesting pertinent articles. One about other, similar Kickstarter projects that turned out to be scammy[1]. And another article, written by the same journalist about scio[2].
[1] http://pando.com/2014/04/04/revealed-healbe-isnt-indiegogos-...
[2] http://pando.com/2014/04/30/consumer-physics-kickstarter-cam...
Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All
#47Very cool idea, but I hate that it must have data connectivity to work. Not only that, they won't actually give users the raw scan results! You have to transmit them and then get the analyzed results only. Reality is that many such services inevitably go under, and then your device is useless. Especially when the service is as compute intensive as this one sounds.
> Not only that, they won't actually give users the raw scan results!
I think the reason for this is that the intermediate results are likely quite bad.
Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All
#48Some thoughts from an organic chemist who has a decent amount of experience using IR spectroscopy.
- IR spectroscopy is one of several methods used together to determine the structure of a molecule. It's certainly not definitive by itself.
- Some functional groups in molecules will give very specific signals (1700 cm^-1 for carbonyl functional groups, C=O), but for a lot of other functional groups, you get very weak signals that can sometimes be hard to distinguish
- IR works pretty good for pure compounds, but when you start to measure mixtures, the overlapping signals can get very difficult to isolate and identify
- As rjdagost mentioned, taking a sensor out of the lab will lead to all sorts of issues. Any stray light will likely cause any readings to look like garbage
I could see this technology being useful to identify different types of plastic. You have a limited universe of possible materials along with some pretty specific functional groups that are either there or not.
To use it as a "molecule sensor for all", seems a big problem to try and tackle.
And how the hell does it determine the ripeness of a avocado through the skin?
Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technology is most likely Raman Spectroscopy.
I think he was referring to the technology, as in the hardware. To do this stuff properly, you often need big expensive equipment, so the real question is what they are doing to achieve results using cheap hardware.
It is probably very similar to how Ubisoft made Just Dance using the Wii controller. The Wii controller was really horrible in terms of what you could read from it, but if you stored what measurements you got from people dancing properly you could score people against that. Basically there was enough degrees of freedom to identify decent dancing to a degree and if you hid what was actually going on people bought it. Although it Wii-based Just Dance is horrible compared to the XBox version that used the Kinetic.
Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In two years ahead it could end up as a useless piece of electronics." I would argue your point is moot. How old is the average, working smartphone? When did you replace your desktop, your flat screen?
Not every piece of hardware has to be replaced every 12-24 months. How often do you upgrade your digital thermometer? Your blood pressure monitor?
No, I'm not saying it does. Single fixed function devices seem to have a longer Mean Time Between Replacement.
I would argue that you're comparing apples to oranges here. Say Fitbit (of which I'm a user) came out with a new improved version that's more accurate, lasts longer between charges and tracks more aspects of my health. Would I replace it - yes.
When the device is part of a service, when you look holistically at the product as a service then I believe concepts such as 'date of expiry for hardware', 'it could end up as a useless piece of electronics.' are moot.
When you upgrade to the lasted version of an installed software application, and the previous .exe can't read the new file format is it 'a useless piece of software?'. Technically yes, so what is different here?