Tuesday, May 13, 2014

SCiO: Your Sixth Sense. A Pocket Molecular Sensor

KICKSTARTER

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Scan materials or physical objects. Get instant relevant information to your smartphone. Food, medicine, plants, and more.
Smartphones made it easy to research facts, capture images, and navigate street maps, but they haven’t brought us closer to the physical environment in which we live – until now. 
Meet SCiO. It is the world's first affordable molecular sensor that fits in the palm of your hand. SCiO is a tiny spectrometer and allows you to get instant relevant information about the chemical make-up of just about anything around you, sent directly to your smartphone.
Out of the box, when you get your SCiO, you’ll be able to analyze food, plants, and medications.
For example, you can:
  • Get nutritional facts about different kinds of food: salad dressings, sauces, fruits, cheeses, and much more.
  • See how ripe an Avocado is, through the peel!
  • Find out the quality of your cooking oil.
  • Know the well being of your plants.
  • Analyze soil or hydroponic solutions.
  • Authenticate medications or supplements.
  • Upload and tag the spectrum of any material on Earth to our database. Even yourself !
These are just a few of the starter applications that you can use upon receiving yourSCiO. After SCiO is released new applications will be developed and released regulary. If you order SCiO from Kickstarter you will get all new applications for free in the next two years.
The possibilities of SCiO applications are endless. for example in the future you can use SCiO to measure properties of cosmetics, clothes, flora, soil, jewels and precious stones, leather, rubber, oils, plastics, and even your pet!
Check out our working prototype in action with clips of our live demos
 The SCiO Mobile App allows you to choose a specific SCiO application from the available options. Once you choose the app you need, you are ready to scan.
Every time you use SCiO you are helping to build a database of knowledge about the stuff around us. So when you use SCiO, you are making everyone smarter. The bigger our community gets, the more data SCiO will have about different materials and this goes right back to our community of users!.
SCiO is for anyone who would like instant information about the things they interact with and consume every day. It is also great for people who want to help develop a rapidly expanding database of useful knowledge that will benefit the entire community of users.  
SCiO is based on the age-old near-IR spectroscopy method. The physical basis for this material analysis method is that each type of molecule vibrates in its own unique way, and these vibrations interact with light to create its own unique optical signature.
SCiO includes a light source that illuminates the sample and an optical sensor called a spectrometer that collects the light reflected from the sample. The spectrometer breaks down the light to its spectrum, which includes all the information required to detect the result of this interaction between the illuminated light and the molecules in the sample.
The spectrometers which are normally used for these high-end near-IR spectroscopy applications are very big and expensive. They can be the size of a laptop and cost tens of thousands of dollars. SCiO is unique as it is based on a tiny spectrometer, designed from the ground up to be mass-produced at low cost with minimal compromise on the available application. This unique feature is achieved by several technology breakthroughs our team has made in the past few years, as we reinvented the spectrometer around low-cost optics and advanced signal processing algorithms.  
SCiO's tiny optical sensor
SCiO's tiny optical sensor
To deliver relevant information in real time, SCiO communicates the spectrum to your smartphone app via Bluetooth, which in turn forwards it to a cloud-based service. Advanced algorithms analyze the spectrum and within seconds deliver information regarding the analyzed sample back to the smartphone to be presented in real time to the user.
We have made loads of prototypes and we are ready to take SCiO into production with your help!
 Compatibility 
  • iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, 5S ( iOS5 or later ) 
  • iPad (3rd generation or later)
  • Android based phones with Bluetooth 4.0 LE ( Android 4.3 or later)
Get a maker's kit and create your own form factor or unique smartphone add-on. If you have access to a 3D printer - design and print any form factor, fueled only by your imagination and tailored to your specific requirements.
 Use our Application Development Kit (ADK) and create a custom made application to scan things that interest you. Anyone, no matter what scientific or technological background they have, can create a SCiO application. Scan solids, liquids, or powders. 
Use one of our pre-defined user interfaces or build your own material sensing app. 
Integrate it with existing smartphone applications or create a whole new augmented reality app or game. The possibilities are truly endless.
SCiO has been under development for several years now. 
At first we only knew what we wanted it to do and we looked for the right technology to provide a solution. It took us few months to define the right technology and come up with a first concept. From concept we have gone through 2-3 stages of technology proof-of-concepts.
Generations of Development- Electronics and Optical Sensor
Generations of Development- Electronics and Optical Sensor
Several months ago we have finished the development of our first prototype. Since then we have produced our 2nd generation (current prototype) and have released several firmware and cloud-based software versions. We have completed the future design of the final product and are now ready to go into mass production. 
SCiO Industrial Design Brainstorming
SCiO Industrial Design Brainstorming
Once the first working prototype was ready, we had to "teach" it what different substances look like. A team of chemists, food technologists, and lab technicians who have been sampling materials like cheese, fruits, grains, oils, pills and much more, in order to begin building the database of substances that the device will identify and analyze. When SCiO hits the market, every user will be able to help expand the database by sampling an array of plants, pharmaceuticals, and raw food materials.
Our lab technicians building the first database of piils
Our lab technicians building the first database of piils
Optical Sensor Assembly
Optical Sensor Assembly
These days we are focusing on the mass production of the device: we are working with our manufacturing partners to complete the preparations of the manufacturing line so we can offer you SCiO at the most affordable price possible
Our R&D team is truly multi-disciplinary, encompassing all the relevant engineering know-how: from optics, physics, electronics, manufacturing, low-level firmware and real time algorithms to back-end software. In addition to data scientists and algorithm experts, our team includes members with degrees in applied physics, chemistry, food technology, and nutrition. Our engineers and advisory board have PhDs or advanced degrees in their relevant fields and hail from top tier reserach institutes such as MIT, Stanford, CalTech, Harvard, Wiezmann Institute, The Technion, and Tel-Aviv University.
Beyond SCiO, our company is developing products geared at industrial applications, where distributed low-cost molecular sensing complements traditional centralized quality control systems.
 SCiO has been in development for several years already. We’ve successfully built multiple working prototypes and are now ready to bring SCiO to consumers around the world.
We chose Kickstarter because we think it’s an amazing platform for bringing innovative, new products to market. The Kickstarter platform helps us facilitate interactive conversations with future users.
By backing our project in Kickstarter, you are helping finance the initial production and manufacturing costs, in turn ensuring that we can offer SCiO at the lowest price possible.
Your contribution will be put to use to
  • Get SCiO into production
  • Build an intuitive, amazing user experience
  • Add more SCiO applications that YOU want to see
SCiO is a very powerful instrument, it can be used for many applications, of which Consumer Physics is building the first few. We are excited to see what applications will be built in the future.
Support us now and get your SCiO for a ultra low price, two years of FREE downloads of all the apps we will develop, and back the next wave of consumer sensing experiences!
SCiO Backer T-Shirt
SCiO Backer T-Shirt
In gratitude for your support, we will lift the 2 year limit on free SCiO apps for our Kickstarter backers upon hitting the $2,000,000 mark. Our reaching this stretch goal will enable you to use any app developed by Consumer Physics, for free, with the SCiO you got on Kickstarter, for your personal, non-commercial use. You can enjoy this perk with no time limit as one of our awesome early supporters when we hit $2,000,000!

Risks and challengesLearn about accountability on Kickstarter

We have been working on SCiO for the last three years. Last year we managed to create our first working prototype, and took another year to perfect it. We are now fine tuning our design for mass production.
We are a group of multi-disciplinary R&D, with vast experience in all relevant engineering and science fields. As part of our progress, we have assessed all the challenges and risks which are part of making such a complicated project. Some of the biggest risks are already behind us. We had to overcome a lot of challenges in order to get to where we are today. But still, there are some more challenges ahead.
The challenges we are facing now are the ones that are always part of the process of taking a working prototype into mass production. The design is highly innovative, we use unique production technology and the Bill of Material includes substantial number of unique and custom parts.
We believe that we were able to minimize those risks in order to deliver SCiO to our backers with full satisfaction.
From the start of this campaign until delivery we will keep you all updated with our work and progress. If there are unexpected issues or delays we promise to keep you in the loop and handle it in full transparency.
We are prepared for the future challenges that are ahead of us and we are committed to keeping you informed of our progress in the months following the campaign.

FAQ

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6,862
backers
$1,399,345
pledged of $200,000 goal
32
days to go
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Project by
Consumer Physics, Inc.
Tel Aviv, Israel
See full bioContact me
Funding period
 -  (47 days)
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