Toronto, Ontario based TellSpec Inc. was founded to build a healthier world by allowing people to make informed choices about what they eat. The company has invented a system which combines a spectrometer handheld scanner that detects allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories and ingredients in food, and then beams the findings to the users smart phone. While most foods have labels these days, Tellspec takes the ingredients even further generating a revealing breakdown on what you may be eating.
Device aims to help people make clean food choices by letting them “check their food as easily as they check their mail,” its makers said.
The scanner utilises a small Raman spectrometer, a unique cloud-based algorithm and a simple smartphone app. Scanning a food item on the plate or in a shopping aisle is as simple as aiming TellSpec at it and pushing a button.
It beams a low-powered laser at the item and analyses the reflected light waves to identify the chemical makeup of the food.
http://tellspec.com/
This data is uploaded to the analysis engine which processes the information, compares it to reference spectra, interprets the results with the help of a database, and downloads the results to the user’s smartphone.
The device can successfully identify foods and their ingredients approximately 97.7 percent of the time after scanning the food’s surface.
Around 3,000 food items were scanned to create the initial database, but TellSpec can potentially identify an unlimited number of ingredients, according to Founder and CEO Isabel Hoffmann, who developed the scanner along with mathematician Stephen Watson.
The device’s ability to make identifications is expected to increase exponentially as the number of TellSpec users grow, and add their own scans of different food items.