Bhaskar Mitra, a 24-year-old food scientist at the University of Copenhagen, has developed a prototype for a smartphone cover that could actually stop people from getting sick, reports Treehugger.
Mitra’s smartphone cover can test water and actually test and treat contaminated liquid food.
Seems like sci-fi
The cover includes a blue lens that allows users to scan their food using the smartphone’s camera, and then an app that Mitra has developed reveals foreign materials, including impurities like glass or sand and potentially dangerous micro-organisms like listeria and cholera.
A UV lamp included on the cover would then be used to kill the bacteria, and the user rescans their food to see if it’s safe.
“The tech was already there,” Mitra told Treehugger’s James Clasper. “Food science is powerful, but if you can add anything interdisciplinary, it becomes twice as powerful.”
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The cover is still in the early development stages, but Mitra said that if it made it to the shelves it would probably cost about 300 kroner at first.
He hopes the price can come down so it would be available to people in the developing world to help prevent the spread of food and water-borne illnesses.
