June 2014

Consumer Physics SCiO Pocket Molecular Sensor
Scan materials and get instant analysis.
Article By Steven R. Rochlin

  Consumer Physics' SCiO ($299) is the world's first affordable molecular sensor that fits in the palm of your hand. SCiO is a tiny spectrometer and allows you to get instant relevant information about the chemical make-up of just about anything around you, sent directly to your smartphone. You can analyze food, plants, and medications. Benefits include getting nutritional facts about different kinds of food, see how ripe an Avocado is through the peel(!), find out the quality of your cooking oil, analyze soil or hydroponic solutions, authenticate medications and so very much more!

While for the time being there are a few starter applications available, the company plans to offer new applications that will be free of charge during the next two years. The possibilities of SCiO applications are nearly endless. SCiO could be employed to measure properties of cosmetics, clothes, flora, soil, jewels and precious stones, leather, rubber, oils, plastics... and your pet!

The SCiO Mobile App allows you to choose a specific SCiO application from the available options. Once you choose the app you need, you are ready to scan. Every time you use SCiO you are helping to build a database of knowledge about items on Earth. So when you use SCiO, you are making everyone smarter. The bigger our community gets, the more data SCiO will have about different materials and this goes right back to our community of users!

SCiO is based on near-IR spectroscopy method, as the physical basis for a material analysis method is that each type of molecule vibrates in its own unique way. These vibrations interact with light to create its own unique optical signature. SCiO includes a light source that illuminates the sample and an optical sensor called a spectrometer that collects the light reflected from the sample. The spectrometer breaks down the light to its spectrum, which includes all the information required to detect the result of this interaction between the illuminated light and the molecules in the sample.

The spectrometers, which are normally used for these high-end near-IR spectroscopy applications, are very big and expensive. They can be the size of a laptop and cost tens of thousands of dollars. SCiO is unique as it is based on a tiny spectrometer, designed from the ground up to be mass-produced at low cost with minimal compromise on the available application.

To deliver relevant information in real time, SCiO communicates the spectrum to your smartphone app via Bluetooth, which in turn forwards it to a cloud-based service. Advanced algorithms analyze the spectrum and within seconds deliver information regarding the analyzed sample back to the smartphone to be presented in real time to the user.

Do you have a 3D printer? If so, then get a maker's kit and create your own form factor or unique smartphone add-on. You can design and print any form factor, fueled only by your imagination and tailored to your specific requirements. The SCiO ADK is the first developer's kit that allows you to develop your own mobile and chemometric applications for personal or commercial use. The ADK includes the kit and support from the Consumer Physics developer support team.

As part of their ADK, Consumer Physics will provide an API allowing developers to communicate with the device, and to send queries to the analysis servers. One of the interfaces of the API will be accessible as a native mobile application plugin for Android or iOS and include device communication methods over the BLE during the sampling phase. Another interface will be implemented as a web service on the server side to support analysis, classification, estimation and other algorithmic methods to work with Consumer Physics’ databases and other cloud flows. A variety of environments will be available to inter-operate with SCiO's API.