Today there are wearable trackers available for just about every move you make and step you take. Almost. If there’s a missing link, it’s the ability to track all the food that enters a person’s mouth. Dieters are stuck tediously logging their eating habits.

TellSpec, a device that’s quickly raising money on Indiegogo, claims to be that missing link and more. With a wave of the hand, the device can reportedly calculate all the calories, ingredients, chemicals, and allergens in any given piece of food.





Developed by entrepreneur Isabel Hoffman and York University math professor Stephen Watson, TellSpec is a raman spectrometer (the same kind of technology used in Jack Andraka’s $15 cancer-detecting device) that uses an algorithm to calculate what’s in your food.

Hoffman first came up with the idea because of her young daughter, who experienced mysterious physical symptoms that were caused by allergens. While eating dinner one evening with Watson, she picked up a flash drive and explained her vision: “Imagine a device the size of a flash drive that could scan food, scan the air, and tell me what kind of pollution I encountered today.” Watson told her that he didn’t think the technology existed.

Raman spectrometers, which essentially shoot lasers at objects and evaluate their chemical composition, used to be big, bulky instruments that sat in laboratories. These days, it’s entirely possible to make a handheld version. Hoffman’s question was whether it could do what she was looking for.

Watch Hoffman and Watson explain the details of how the device works in their Indiegogo video:

In sum, the laser scans food and measures the light that’s reflected back. That information is sent to a smartphone app that uses TellSpec’s algorithms to measure the qualities of what’s in the food. Hoffman says it takes about 30 seconds on average to get a reading, though some dark foods take longer.