We think of digital health in terms of devices or phones that are meant to track a measure of the body or our health. However, there have been several portable tools and toys that are being made that enable you to monitor what you eat and what you consume. The device list with many fluorescent and luminescence-based devices that also incorporate a cell phone is impressive as this review will show.
There are several apps that will monitor what you eat and consume and walk however, very few will measure your food to tell you what you are consuming.
The one that got the most attention was the SCiO handheld spectrometer that measured the reflected Raman spectrum. This was a kickstarted project quite a while ago and has morphed into a consumer grade spectrometer with most of the features disabled and then a professional grade spectrometer that performs much better.
This got the most publicity initially since they promised several interesting applications but there is only a very basic set that is available for the consumer. What it does in that small package is impressive.
The companies is trying to balance giving extra value to the consumer while extracting the most value from their technology though in its present iteration it is so basic that the company has probably not given much thought to their target customer and providing any specific use case.
One area that needs to be developed is assessment of liquids like wines and alcohol’s. Think about the amount of time and effort that goes into creating a good whiskey. This has been used before and SWRI ( Scotch Whiskey Research Institute) in Edinburgh they are looking at a variety of methods that could be used to determine quality of their whiskey. The real gold mine may be the ability to see through the bottle and determine purity rather than opening the bottle and sampling for genuine-ness.
There are other campaigns that are in progress to determine what is in your food based on spectroscopy – like this one.
These technologies can detect problems or fraud but finally, it comes down to taste. If there are two blends of whiskey and you cannot tell them apart then do you really need a very fine analytical instrument to tell you which one you should drink?