Marie Donlon | July 21, 2022
A team from Australia’s Flinders University has developed a device that can assess the spoilage or the ripeness of fresh fruits and vegetables, thereby reducing food waste.
The GoMicro’s Spotcheck device, which pairs with its accompanying GoMicro Spotcheck App, features a $1 phone attachable magnifier that accurately determines the level of ripeness or spoilage of fresh foods.
Source: Flinders University
According to its developers the GoMicro’s Spotcheck device features an imaging system and an artificial intelligence (AI) app that promises to save agricultural industries vast amounts of money due to a reduction in food waste by assessing the ripeness or spoilage of fruits and vegetables with a reported 86% to 99% rate of accuracy, measured in days.
To develop the system, the GoMicro team, which is a microscopy 4.0 company based at Flinders University, captured 100 images of different vegetables every day to build the AI application.
The result is patent-pending technology producing lab-quality imaging conditions that dramatically increase the accuracy of detection and reduce the number of images necessary for training the system, according to the researchers
“Any farmer with a phone will have the diagnostic capability of an agronomist — through building a more accurate AI engine into the Spotcheck microscope attached to a phone,” the researchers explained.
