This is the port district of Tel Aviv. It’s a popular shopping area, and the perfect place
to meet up with Dror Sharon, a former member of the Air Force, and now the founder of Consumer Physics.
The company raised $2.7 million via a huge Kickstarter campaign so that it could
produce a device called the SCiO, which may soon change the way we shop for groceries.
When you think about it, how do you make your selection today?
Grab it and feel how firm it is.
So it’s good, but you might want to have some scientific backing to what you’re doing.
Right.
The SCiO replaces your grandmother’s squeeze test - sorry, grandma - to tell you the best
cucumber or tomato to pick.
In an instant, it displays the food’s calorie, fat and sugar content.
It’s the quickest way to finding the perfect potato.
That’s cool. It’s really cool.
And you can actually train yourself
I mean this is like some Star Trek S*** right?!
A spectrometer usually looks like this. It’s a big ole hunk of scientific gear that can
peer into things and determine their properties. Rather incredibly, the SCiO shrinks much of
the same technology down onto a chip. It zaps an object with near infrared light, stirs
up its molecules and tells a story about the object. As people go around zapping things
with the SCiO, the objects get put into a database - this then becomes a giant log of
all the materials in our world.
That sounds all well and good,
but how would the SCiO fair against one of mankind’s most mysterious creations.
This is the cheese test. Good ole American Velveeta.
The label is 290, here its 300.
So it’s almost spot on! What’s the fat percentage on the label?
23
23 and you’re 25!
The SCiO’s value should go well beyond kumquats and industrialized cheese.
It can help farmersdecide when to harvest their crops,
it can detect watered down fuel at shady gas stations,
and It can tell real medicines from fake pills.
When you think of health care actually, it's not about what you’re buying it's actually
tracking your well being over time
Ok!
and instead of sending stuff to the lab you’ll actually be able to measure it on yourself.
Dror even sees a future for this device in your bathroom.
You can measure teeth, you can measure saliva, you can measure hair, you can measure urine,
you can measure the other thing so there's a ton of stuff and people tell us that they’re
going to use it for clinical trials.
So I’m gonna take my smartphone into the toilet.
Well it'll probably be inside your toilet already.
Oh right, yea, that make sense.