SOON your fridge could tell you if your food is off, thanks to special laser
technology.
The bacteria-detecting laser can be mounted inside the fridge and uses beams
of light to read just how safe the food inside is.
It does this by bouncing the beams off bugs that may be multiplying on the
surface of any food.
This impressive technology could be available within a year.
Experts now hope that the machine will be able to reduce cases of food
poisoning by letting people know when their food is going off.
According to The Times, the South Korean inventors of the device particularly
hope to target the bacteria Campylobacter.
Campylobacter is believed to be existent in almost three quarters of chicken
carcasses in Europe and causes over 280,000 cases of food poisoning and 100
deaths in the UK each year.
According to the government, this costs the country approximately a whopping
£1billion each year in healthcare as well as lost productivity.
However this new laser system could change all this, and takes 30 scans of the
food each second to see what is crawling on its surface.
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These video clips then help to identify how the food is ‘speckled’.
However, although researchers proved that the device worked on chicken breasts
that were contaminated with E.Coli and Bacillus, they did admit that
accuracy could be improved.
Speaking to The Times, Yong Keun Park, a professor of bio-medical optics at
the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, said: “The idea is
very simple. When a laser beam is impinged on to biological tissues – meat,
chicken, fish – [the] reflected light should exhibit complex patterns known
as speckle patterns because the light paths inside the tissue are highly
scrambled.
“Although speckle patterns seem complex, they do not change as long as the
tissues are static.
“However, when there are living micro-organisms in the tissues, their
movements make the speckle patterns change over time.”
This means that it would be possible to tell whether certain micro-organisms
are present on your food. Clever.