Tellspec: amazing IR spectrometry advance or scam?

So on another web forum I found this product, Tellspec, with an IndieGogo crowd funding campaign. Their objective seems to be a keychain sized product which you wave over food like a magic wand and which will scan it to produce a nutrient breakdown as well as check for particular components.



Nothing that I know about instrumentation would suggest to me that this is currently possible but there is much I do not know (I'm so far from being an instrumentation guy it's not even funny) but, in principle, a lot of this stuff is doable. I repeat, in principle .



Apparently, light spectrometry on a chip exists at least as a product in development (the separation being done by some sort of resonance effect). However, they claim to be doing Raman spectrometry at http://tellspec.com/howitworks/ :

Quote:

The handheld scanner is a Raman spectrometer. The low-powered laser inside the scanner emits a beam through the front window. Light emitted from the sample is then collected through a filter in the same window. This light then passes through a diffraction grating that disperses the light onto an image sensor, which converts it into an electrical signal that is then digitized.

Maybe there are chips out there which can do this. I have no idea, quite frankly (though my spidey sense is definitely tickling on this product concept as a whole). The first hit Googling that talked about integrating this sort of analysis on silicon was from a laser manufacturer and talks about why a particular research team chose their laser. One of the stated reasons is "High power (> 2 W @ 785 nm & > 500 mW for entire bandwidth) that is required for Raman spectroscopy which is inherently a very weak process". And yet their product claims to do the same thing with a laser powered by a rechargeable battery in a device that you recharge from a USB port and which is smaller than most computer mice. And you are, supposedly using this device in uncontrolled environments.



And let's look at their team:



This is one founder, Dr. Isabel Hoffmann, who apparently co-founded anti-aging clinics in Beverly Hills. Can you say "potential red flag"? I knew you could!



The other founder is a mathematician which sounds legitimate. Strangely, his most prominent and recent experience seems to be in a multimedia company fighting intellectual property battles.



Then we have:

• Martin Merener - Mathematician (looks like a buddy from York University. Nothing wrong with that and mathematicians make sense as this would require heavy lifting on the analysis side. fMRI data analysis even seems potentially relevant if you need to deconvolute the messy data that this device would produce)


• Maureen Novak - food photographer


• Margaret McClintock - writer and editor


• Chao Gao - industrial designer (the guy who made the mock ups, maybe?)


• Gisele Waters -customer experience analyst (WTF? What customers? They don't even have a product yet!)


• Xue Feng -graphic designer (helped out with the videos and website, I'm guessing)


• Sarah Ong - food scientist (undergraduate degree --her graduate degree is an MBA)


• Pranay Gupta - (Indian fellow. Looks hopeful. Nope, another marketing drone :( )

So mostly marketing drones and not a single technologist??? Maybe that's what they need the money for, to hire the technologists who can make the product?



Besides, do you really mean to tell me that this magic wand you haphazardly wave in the general direction of food can isolate and tell apart individual proteins (their "demo" shows the device identifying gluten) in their analysis and yet the site doesn't list a single reference?



The level of signal resolution implied is beyond the ridiculous. Unless they are using technology secretly recovered from the Roswell crash site, I just can't buy it.



I call scam!

via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=266325&goto=newpost