The Fascinating World of Food Scanners - The Medical Futurist

Would you like to know what is in that snack? How about your dinner plate, or the meal just served to you at the restaurant, fast food place, or the meal delivered to you from Plate, or other online food order?

Advances in technology and 'sniffer chips' can analyze biological chemicals and tell you.  This technology is not yet widely available.  However, it is coming soon Think about what it will do for health and wellness and your plans to lose 25 pounds before the holidays.

SCIO uses infrared spectrometry to identify chemical fingerprints

We strongly believe that digital health can bring healthcare into the 21st century and make patients the point-of-care.

There are two major issues. One is size because the device must be handheld to become popular. With current technology, this means engineers have to sacrifice sensitivity and accuracy in order to achieve a convenient size. The other issue is the algorithm. SCiO sends data to the cloud which then sends its calculation back to the device. But to simplify what the algorithm has to do, users need to tell the scanner specifics – like whether the sample is a portion of solid food, a liquid, or vegetable. These inconveniences are the price of keeping the scanner small.

There aren’t any promising handheld food scanners on the horizon besides these, but there is no reason to believe a solution will not arise in the coming years. The challenge is not when a workable device comes along but what we will do with the large amount of data it generates.

Big data and the Internet of things will improve nutrition
Let’s say a scanner tells me how many grams of sugar my fruit contains, or what the alcohol percentage of a drink is. So what? It won’t change my behavior and dietary habits unless I’m a dietitian and understand what the data means, and how it can be acted upon. Food scanners will need to progress similarly to wearable health trackers – move from raw data to automated analysis and smart suggestions to the user.

Learn more about the most exciting technological changes shaping healthcare! A good food scanner should accurately determine ingredients, and compare the data to my lifestyle, dietary choices, and my genomic background. Given how different we all are genetical, two people might digest the same food at a different pace. One might be allergic to an ingredient while the other is not. So far, pure luck and experience have alerted us to these differences. It should not work like that. Eating should be a conscious process where we know what we eat, and know what we should eat for optimum health. A food scanner, supported by a smart application could fill this place.

But let’s not leave out an interesting side note here, namely, incorporating genetic information into food scanners. I already have the data of my complete DNA sequence at home in a digital file. Literally, thousands of studies speak to the genetic aspects of nutrition, a field called nutrigenomics. I should be able to learn what foods and individual ingredients are bad for me. Genetic tests showed me that I’m sensitive to caffeine and process alcohol more thoroughly than most people (I’m Hungarian after all).

Nutrigenomics tries to understand how nutrition affects our metabolic pathways, and what we can do to get the most out of nutrition in a personalized way. If I’ll have the opportunity to choose another type of meat or cheese as a smartphone app suggests based on my DNA, I will enjoy the meal more and take better care of my body in the long run. With access to such data, a scanner or app could tell us what products not to buy at the grocery store, what type of food makes us more productive, sleep better, or just feel healthy. Right now we’re depending on blind luck.

Some people wonder if this wouldn’t be an overly technological world where devices, scanners, and apps tell us what to eat and do. I prefer to look at it from a different angle, from the benefits of finally knowing what we eat and what ingredients lead to positive and negative consequences. I see customization to my specific genetic background as another benefit, too.

Diabetes patients would know how many carbohydrates their food contains. But knowledge doesn’t change behavior alone, otherwise, nobody would smoke by now. Knowledge supported by gaming or technologies revealing our lifestyle choices to our family members or caregivers might do. Patients with rare genetic metabolic disorders such as phenylketonuria would know what to avoid at all cost. People with allergies could avoid dangerous meals. Having a good diet would not rely on the experience we bring with us from childhood and what we have learned since then. Instead, it could be based on informed decisions. If it means a food scanner should become a commodity in my life for this, count me in.

Tellspec is another handheld scanner device to analyze food. Here is how it works.

The developer of Tellspec is Tellspec’s CEO, Isabel Hoffmann, is the recipient of the 2018 Women in Innovation awarded by the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT).

These devices can also analyze other substances besides foods. The manufacturers of both scanners offer SDKs for developing other analytic profiles.

Infrared spectroscopy has been around for a long time. Sir William Herschel was the first to recognize the existence of infrared in 1800. Interest in IR was not explored further for 80 years. During 1882-1900 several investigations were made into the IR region. Today's iteration is the result of microchips and miniaturization of the scanner, merging it with cloud-based software and algorithms which can be plugged in via software to modify the scanner's range of detection.

The author:  Gary M. Levin M.D.

The Fascinating World of Food Scanners - The Medical Futurist: