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| Physically touching the fruit to evaluate can potentially become obsolete. |
Do you have a hard time determining fruit ripeness? Do you have a smartphone? Well, in that case, the 21st
century phenomenon of “there’s an app for that” has finally come around to addressing your issue. Researchers out of MIT Media Lab
have developed a spectrometer, a device that measures wavelength of light, and
an algorithm executable on smartphones that effectively measure ripeness of various fruits, including apples, bananas, and oranges.
While working in tandem, the spectrometer and smartphone software can
calculate the ripeness of the fruit in question, affording any human the
ability to determine ripeness of fruit for eating.
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| MIT Media Lab's fruit spectrometer |
Spectrometers have historically been expensive to produce
and quite large; however, through the advancement of micro-electro-mechanical
systems technology, scientists were able to shrink the size of the spectrometer chip to
about the size of your average garage door opener. Due to their accuracy in measuring objects
without touching or disturbing them, spectrometers are indeed used in a variety
of fields, including the use I outlined in my last blog post (reading books
without opening them. Similarly, the
spectrometer designed by MIT Media Lab emits electromagnetic radiation and
reads the radiation reflected back to it.
In this case, instead of ink, the EM
radiation is reflected by the chlorophyll within the skin of the fruit, and instead
of terahertz waves, ultraviolet fluorescence is measured. Researchers were able to design an algorithm
to evaluate the amount of fluorescence measured and determine how ripe the
given fruit is, and alert the user how much longer the fruit needs to ripen in
the event it is not yet fully ripe. The
spectrometer can be assembled for about $250 and communicates wirelessly with
the smartphone.
The device is not yet available in the open market. However, they have released an open-source
platform online at hackaday.io, which provides all the information needed for
someone to replicate the device or even develop it further.
Pictures and References:
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-ripe-apple-app-20160910-snap-story.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj8E8iOkU-w
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit
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