A team at the University of Cambridge has built an optical spectrometer that costs about $10 and measures a few centimetres across, raising the prospect of laboratory-grade chemical testing inside a watch or a patch.
The device, developed with spin-out company GlitterinTech, identifies materials by reading how light interacts with them. In tests it named foods, plastics and medicines with 100% accuracy, according to the university. The team says it can also track blood glucose, alcohol and other markers without drawing blood.
A different way to split light
Normal spectrometers spread light into wavelengths with prisms or gratings, or rebuild a spectrum with heavy computation. Shrinking those designs usually costs range, resolution or accuracy, which is why cheap sensors are good at spotting what a substance is but poor at measuring how much of it is there.
The Cambridge device instead applies a mathematical operation called convolution directly to incoming light, using the convolution theorem to encode spectral information. The researchers say this beats dispersion-based, Fourier-transform and computational designs on several measures at the same size.
Where it could be used
Three uses stand out. The first is wearable health monitoring, where a sensor that needs no needle could change how diabetes is managed. The second is food and drug checking, from spotting adulterated ingredients to confirming a pill matches its label. The third is industrial quality control, where a cheap reader on a production line can flag a bad batch before it ships.
What is still missing
The work is at prototype stage. Accuracy in a controlled test is not the same as accuracy on a sweaty wrist or a moving conveyor, and the team has not published field results. Even so, a $10 part changes the economics of measurement: instead of sending samples to a lab, the lab travels with the sample.
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