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SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All

kickstarter.com

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Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All

#51

Post by rootuser »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #12

Does anyone have an email address to contact them directly? I'm concerned this might be a scam and I want to ask them a few in depth questions and I'd rather not be forced to do that through kickstarter or twitter.

You are not very intelligent. 1)Considering the CEO or CHO went to MIT Sloan Business school I would try drorsh@sloan.mit.edu 2) Since the company's website is www.consumerphysics.com I would try googling dror@consumerphysics.com and you will find this gem: http://www.bezalel.ac.il/alumni/workforgrads/?thread=9142 It is in Hebrew but according to google translate it has the Phone and email of the founder. So I called him and talked to him. I said I think it is a scam. HE CAME TO MY HOUSE here in the US, I am not kidding!!! He sat at my table with the gadget and I had a bunch of pills, fruit and just random stuff from the fridge. He let me use it while he was on the phone, no gimmicks, no sales pitches, no hovering, no excuses. It works pretty well for a prototype. Did not detect the alcohol percentage in the wine. Had no problems with pills and fruit.

Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All

#52

Post by bhouston »

rjdagost wrote: post #26

For 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…

I wrote this elsewhere in this comment section but it is directly relevant to your sentence.

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 (it had no clue what your body position was), 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 though it sort of worked. Although the Wii-based Just Dance is horrible compared to the XBox version that used the Kinetic.

The key is to hide the intermediate results and profile a lot of things using the same crap sensor and then do fuzzy matching between the bad results. This works if there is enough discernible degrees of freedom.

Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All

#53

Post by sudont »

ogoldberg wrote: post #46
sytelus wrote: post #11

There 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...

Hopefully it wasn't a "Clever Hans" type of demonstration for the second one. IE, someone watching on camera and then manually entering data into the interface from a different room.

Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All

#54

Post by danielweber »

edanm wrote: post #45
Zarkonnen wrote: post #5

Hm, 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.

A scam doesn't require everyone involved at all levels to be complicit, or even to fail to do due diligence.

(This whole thing strikes me as "too good to be true." Note how they put media claims above their own claims.)

Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All

#55

Post by edanm »

danielweber wrote: post #54
edanm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A scam doesn't require everyone involved at all levels to be complicit, or even to fail to do due diligence. (This whole thing strikes me as "too good to be true." Note how they put media claims above their own claims.)

You're right about that, I'm just putting it out there that they're not a scam in the sense of "a fake company that's built just to fleece people on Kickstarter without having anything real behind it", which is what some people mean. That's also the kind of "scam" I heard when people discussed other projects like this.

Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All

#56

Post by HCIdivision17 »

pervycreeper wrote: post #27
fredoliveira wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that using the SDK they provide lets you access the raw scan results. It would severely limit the possibilities for the apps they want developers to work on on top of their device.

From the comments page: >Dear backers, Some of you have asked about access to the raw spectrum and some subscription fees related questions. We take your comments very seriously and are now processing that internally. Please stay tuned for our upcoming updates. Thank you for supporting our project! The ConsumerPhysics Team I take that, along with the pitch page to indicate that they weren't intending to initially, at…

This would make sense to me (despite how distasteful it is to kickstart a closed-data project). Back in school, I remember what what essentially an encyclopedia set that was just X-Ray diffraction peaks for various (all?!) materials and substances. There was also peak detection software, but the libraries were not as easy to trace and look up, so we resorted to the books often (at least for a second opinion).

That they may treat the sensor fingerprints as a Trade Secret of some sort makes sense, considering the current cost and value of such data.

Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All

#57

Post by rjdagost »

refurb wrote: post #48

Some 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…

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.

Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All

#58

Post by ycui1986 »

refurb wrote: post #48

Some 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…

SCiO is based-on near-IR spectroscopy, instead of typical IR spectroscopy. Even though they both share the same "IR" in the name. The way how these technique work can be significantly different.

SCiO do not use typical IR spectroscopy. For near-IR typically, chemometrics (or let's say PCA) has to be used to get any type useful information from the result.

Re: SCiO: A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All

#60

Post by ihnorton »

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

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