Ever wish you could just point a device at an object, take a reading, and get details on what it is and what it’s made of at a molecular level? Essentially, you’d have a Star Trek-style tricorder.
Thanks to a startup’s work with mobile giant Qualcomm, the technology could soon be inside your phone.
Photo by Kalea Morgan on Unsplash
The first use will be skincare, the company says. But eventually the sensor will be able to scan the food on your plate, know what you’re eating along with its caloric value and nutrient content, and feed that information to your health and diet apps. Or tell you which plastics are recyclable, whether your food is fresh and safe, and more.
Smartphones can already sense motion, radio communications on multiple frequencies, light, sound, and distance. Including a spectrometer would add yet another sense to our most portable of personal computers.
“We make the invisible visible. We bring the lab to everyone,” Dr. Wilfried Hermes, a director at Trinamix told me recently on a TechFirst episode. “We measure micro ingredients of food. We measure protein levels, carbohydrates, fat content of different food.”
Trinamix is a five-year old startup founded by chemical giant BASF SE. It builds spectrometers: sensors which send out infrared light that is reflected off objects, returned to the sensor, and analyzed. A spectrometer essentially splits light into its spectral components — like a rainbow, at least in the visible spectra. Because each element has a different spectral signature, a spectrometer can identify what kind of matter it is looking at. Trinamix’ new innovation is to shrink the emitting and sensing technology to fit in a smartphone, and it’s working with Qualcomm to make that a reality.
The first application will be skincare, Hermes says. Smartphones equipped with Trinamix technology will measure the lipids in your face to see if you have dry skin or are well moisturized, and then recommend a skincare product.
Fundamentally, however, the technology will work on any element.
Listen to the interview behind this story in the TechFirst podcast:
Personally, since I try to count not just my calories but also the macronutrients in my diet, the holy grail is an app that you can simply point at your plate. It knows what’s there and how much, and can immediately determine the nutritional value and energy stored in that food, and send that data to any relevant app via Apple HealthKit or Google Fit.
That’s coming, Hermes says.
“What they are missing is a sensor which can look into the food ... into the molecules, and this is what we are doing,” he says. “So we bring now the spectrometer into the smartphone, and then you can add this information to the apps which are already there.”
Other applications include sorting plastics or other materials for recycling, measuring the caffeine content of coffee (or any other drink), and checking for harmful substances in children’s toys. And, of course, when the techno-curious get their hands on the technology, the sky’s the limit.
A spectrometer is great, but Hermes thinks it won’t end there.
“We’re talking about IR spectroscopy, but we can think about also X-ray and MRI — it’s not possible today, but I see this will be the trend in future, to bring the laboratory to everyone,” he says.
That’s may be the future — and I look forward to it — but the immediate opportunity and existing capability is spectrometry. Trinamix is bringing the sensor technology, but analysis is where Qualcomm comes in.
Qualcomm VP Manvinder Singh says that the company is “excited to work with Trinamix to optimize their technology on Snapdragon.” The company says that the “Qualcomm Sensing Hub” will process the data the sensor captures using Snapdragon’s AI engine, enabling analysis and identification of sensed materials.
The technology is not shipping today, however, and will require work from integrators and smartphone manufacturers to come to market. Given the fact that Trinamix has the support of its massive corporate parent, and the cooperation of Qualcomm — a major player in mobile technology — there’s a good chance it could happen in the next few years.
If and when that happens, the company will deliver on Hermes’ promise to “bring the lab to everyone.”
Of course, it’s likely that not everyone cares about identifying the chemical or molecular composition of every object near them. However, it’s just as likely that future app developers will be able to incorporate the technology into environmental apps, health apps, home inspection apps, nature apps, and a thousand other applications we can only imagine right now.
And those apps — whether or not we understand how they work — will now be able to offer new and compelling capabilities.
