TellSpec: A Food Scanner for Allergens

What if you can tell exactly what is in your food? Will you be able to avoid allergens or toxic chemicals? This is the idea behind TellSpec, a scanner that can calculate all the calories, ingredients, chemicals, and allergens in food.

Traditional raman spectrometers' bulky size meant that they can only be used in laboratories, but nowadays a handheld version is possible. TellSpec is a raman spectrometer that uses an algorithm to calculate what's in your food. A laser scans food and measures the light reflected back. The information is sent to a smartphone app for algorithms to measure food quality, taking about 30 seconds to read. The food analysis engine has been tested with three kinds of spectrometers, but the 3-D printed device in the video is still in prototyping phase. 

Other devices based on this technology can be seen in a cancer-detecting device by 16-year old and a startup called AIRO that promises to deliver a wearable spectroscopic wristband. A similar device (2nd video) called SCiO also got funded in Kickstarter. There is a trend in all these devices: their product does not exist yet, but they all cater to one specific goal- in human-computer interaction, this is called 'Wizard of Oz' technique- to find out product demand and get consumer feedback before spending expensive resources on developing the technology.

We also recommend watching: "Scanadu: The Medical Tricorder is Here" and "The Barcode of Life: A Bar Code For Everything We Eat".

TellSpec: A Food Scanner for Allergens

Isabel Hoffmann is an executive who in 19 years founded 8 companies in fields from preventive medicine, health care, genetics, technology, entertainment to education. Stephen Watson holds a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the University of Toronto. He is a tenured full professor of mathematics at York University in Toronto and an inventor of 48 patents in encryption systems, media encryption, distribution, synchronization, recognition, bookmarking and user interfaces.