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Op-Ed: Turn your smartphone into a real tricorder? New tech delivers

This is one of the holy grails of both real and popular science. There are Kickstarter projects, and a lot of various tricorder technologies in various states of development. Tel Aviv University has come up with a working version. Their approach uses a very basic setup of a tuneable filter optical device and processor to manage analysis. Try
1. Optical device records hyperspectra data
2. Processor extracts and manages image data
3. Result produces analysis.
The big deal here is the hyperspectral imaging element. Spectra are scientific currency across all disciplines. Every element has its own personal and more importantly readable hyperspectral characteristics. Hyperspectral imaging is high precision imaging, a sort of data-derived HD, using values assigned to pixels. This technology is a very distant, much more advanced version of thermal imaging, the best known analytical imaging system that shows heat variations and climate data.
It’s also, not at all coincidentally, the most appropriate form of imaging for data analysis. Spectral classification is a standard benchmark for a wide range of materials analysis, even taking over from carbon dating in age analysis for materials. The imaging system processes received light to generate analytical data.
Existing tricorders

Current “tricorder apps” are basically linked to sensors. The overall process is sensing of information, calibration, and getting a reading. Some, as in the video, are claimed to have 95 percent accuracy and could be a huge plus for GPs and ERs. Problem being, the capabilities of sensors are extremely variable, sensitive, and capabilities are all over the place, although in fairness medical apps include the ability to take some demanding measurements.
What use is a tricorder? Just about everything, for everyone
There’s a lot more to this story in terms of practical problem solving for just about anyone.
A working tricorder can do a lot more than produce more Star Trek movies and TV shows. In the increasingly chemically complex modern industrial world, finding problems and identifying material properties is now extremely big business. This technology is a true problem solver for just about all industries.
A portable “what the hell is this” finder has a lot going for it in all the sciences. Identifying toxins in food, for example, could be a major app for consumers, plaintiffs, and the food tech industry. Biologists could analyze individual biological functions on the spot, and physicists could find active material properties as they happen, per nanosecond, at least in theory.
For gardeners and farmers, a tricorder would be able to find residues from pests, chemicals, fungi, and contaminants, which is a 100 percent blessing.
For the average human being, a customized tricorder capability could be very useful as a survival tool as well as fascinating. Imagine scanning your fridge and finding every bit of dangerous food, or some toxic waste dump in the veg compartment. At work, your DIY OHS could be improved by spotting iffy electrical connections, computer hot spots, and identifying the remains of something in the canteen. This thing could become as much a part of life as a phone, quite easily.
For outdoor people, it could find food, identify risks, spot marauding animals, or find a cool place and water on a hot day. How much more useful could a phone get?
At the high end of the tech scale, the benefits are potentially endless:
For forensics, a tricorder capability eliminates a lot of extremely expensive, heavy duty, non-portable tech, and enables fast analysis and management of recording of deteriorating organic and other materials.
For IT and systems people, a tricorder could analyze hardware, spot shoddy materials, and identify flaws in circuits. It’d be an easy way of saving time and maintaining the sanity of quality control people in production, and also useful for those contracting to buy working systems.
For science, this capability is the hand held version of WTF analysis, allowing researchers to pin down unpredicted and unexpected transient actions and reactions.
For medicine, an instant, accurate analysis of accessible information from samples could be critical to dealing with toxins, allergies, and other high risk medical situations on site, ASAP.
The net value for all these operations is drastically reduced cost, improved times, and much better frontline capacity. Better still, a recording function, presumably with upload capabilities as well, creates an audit trail of information which can be cross checked against other readings.
One more, interesting, thing — a technology which takes the guesswork out of basic functional situations and can provide reliable independently sourced, verifiable, data is a first in human history. That really does deserve a mention. Great science, great discovery.

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Written By

Editor-at-Large based in Sydney, Australia.

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