Nutritional Content of Food with RamanPi

It's been a long time since I wrote anything on this. For some family medical reasons I've been unable to actually pursue this project at all over the summer, and don't foresee that changing anytime soon, but wanted to write a quick note for posterity and anyone else who happens across this topic and is interested.

It turns out, I'm not the only person to have this idea, there were not one but TWO "failed" crowdfunding campaigns for similar devices in the last two years, one on Indigogo and the other on Kickstarter.

TellSpec: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tellspec-what-s-in-your-food

SciO: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903107259/scio-your-sixth-sense-a-pocket-molecular-sensor-fo

I should mention that neither project has materialized into real thing, and present most people seem to consider both of them to be failed products at best, or scams at worst.

Where does this leave my project? I still do not know for sure whether this is technically feasible. Products can fail for a myriad of reasons unrelated to technical feasibility (supply chain issues, mismanagement of funds or time, cost overruns, marketing failure, etc.). I do know now that my "idea" is NOT new, thus if it was an easy problem it most likely should have been solved by now.

A second thought has occurred to me. For this to catch on and have the far reaching effect I had envisioned, the barriers to entry need to be vastly lower. As amazing as the RamanPi project is, it really is made to be a tool for hackers and technical enthusiasts like us, not foody consumers. Raman spectroscopy is, frankly, really hard, and there are other easier forms of spectroscopy that could yield equally useful information. Technically, complementary nutritional and chemical information can be gleaned from Infrared spectroscopy, which is MUCH easier to accomplish.

Ultra-cheap visible and infrared spectrometers based on smartphones already exist thanks to the work of PublicLab: http://store.publiclab.org/collections/spectrometry

Thus I think an ultimately more fruitful effort would be to explore this pre-existing hardware and ascertain whether it would be "good enough" for scanning food, perhaps through the advantages afforded through the use of "big data". If anyone one reads this and has better ideas you would like to share I'm all ears! Cheers