The TellSpec Hand-Held Scanner Food Analyzer

The TellSpec is, in my opinion, the most impressive smartphone enabled device that I have ever seen. It has the potential to revolutionize the way we choose what we eat. You may someday wonder how you ever lived without it?

Wouldn’t be great to someday:
1. Know if a piece of “organic” produce was really toxin free?

2. Know if food contained something that you know that you are highly allergic to?

3 Know the nutritional breakdown of your food, including calories, fat content, trans-fat content, sugar content, sodium, vitamins, minerals and more?

4. To be able to do all of this in seconds, without costing a fortune and be able to scan food through plastic or glass, even before you buy it?

That day is right around the corner!

Isabel Hoffmann’s daughter was sick and initially, no specialists could determine what was causing her illness. It was finally determined that she had a number of food allergies and sensitivities. Isabel wanted to develop a technology to scan food for these allergens, so she teamed up with a colleague, mathematician Stephen Watson. They set out to create TellSpec, a hand-held device that you can simply point a laser at a food item, to identify what’s in it. Not only does the device warn you about chemicals, allergens and ingredients you’d rather avoid, it’ll also help you figure out food sensitivities and track your nutritional and vitamin intake. The goal, the company says, is to help people make clean food choices by letting them “check their food as easily as they check their mail.”

“We want to promote healthier eating, alert those who have allergies and educate consumers by telling them exactly what’s in their food, beyond what the label”, says Hoffman.

The device utilizes 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 analyzes the reflected light waves to identify the chemical makeup of the food.
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. Hoffman states that the device can successfully identify foods and their ingredients approximately 97.7% of the time after scanning the food’s surface.

“Depending on how transparent the surface of the food is, the more accurate the scan will be,” explains Hoffman. “Users must understand that these scans can only go so deep. To scan a Twinkie, the user could do two separate scans for a more accurate reading. One at the surface and then a second in the center of the Twinkie.”

The team scanned 3,000 food items to create the initial database, but the device can potentially identify an unlimited number of ingredients, according to Hoffman. Its ability to make identifications is expected to increase exponentially as the number of TellSpec users grow.

TellSpec will do more than tell you if there’s Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) in that soup mix or if those chips are truly gluten-free. It can also give you the background story on little-known ingredients like Tartrazine, a synthetic lemon yellow that’s commonly used as food coloring. For the calorie conscious, TellSpec can breakdown the amount of sugars, fats and more per gram of a scanned food item. It can help users ascertain that they stay within recommended limits, when it comes to their intake of toxic substances like mercury.
Plans are in the works to have the device calculate the volume of food a person consumes, too.

All the TellSpec data will be open source, allowing anyone to use the data to create their own health-based apps. For instance, a diabetic app that tracks blood sugar levels could utilize TellSpec data to track what sugars or carbohydrates the user consumes, and identify ingredients in their food that would also convert into sugar.

TellSpec is currently still under development. Its US price tag will be $320.00, which will include one year of unlimited food scans, with further analyses being made available through subscription plans.

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TellSpec Website