Introduction
Scio, developed by the Israel company Cosnumer Physics was perhaps the world’s first general handheld spectrometer. The developmented started already 10 years ago and was financed by crowdfounding. The specifications of the spectrometer where not revealed and the results relied on online, proprietary interpretations. Despie raising almost $24M in crowdfunding, the device was not well received. “SCiO, the pocket-sized molecular analyzer, is making everyone angry” read a TechCrunch headline in 2016. A critical summary of the project published in 2019: SCiO: The Unsteady Journey Of A Kickstarter Darling That Promised Big Discoveries.
Cosnumer Physics instead turned focus from the cosumer market to Business-to-Business and developed sensor specifically for agricutural business. At present (April 2023) they offer a special products for analysing animal feed nutrients and a more general Near Infra-Red (NIR) spectrometer for grains and berries (the latter seems close to the orginal consumer product).