Don’t trust the calorie count on that Big Mac? Try scanning it

Admit it, some of you are in the calories counting game; Yes, I am guilty of it too – but does the number on food packaging really accurate? There is a startup based in Israel called Consumer Physics Inc that is developing a laser-based gear called SCIO that would scan your food and tells you the chemical compound that is in the food, it will then return details of nutrition value including calories to user’s smartphone.

It seems pretty far fetched, but the idea in theory is very doable. The optical sensor called a spectrometer collects the light reflected from the scanned object and breaks down its spectrum that contain information of molecules.

SCIO can also scan medicines, plants, and more. All the collected information of objects can also be share with a community of users; hence making it a repository of compounds data. It hits Kickstarter and was successfully funded on June 16th with over $2.7M.