[MBCook]

Apple has already been working on this, would love the feature, and has an absolute hell of a lot of cash.

They also know how to turn very complicated things into miniaturized production products.

If they could provide enough proof that it works the way they say it does, I bet they could find a really good suitor there. And you know the various other health/smart watch companies would love to get one up on Apple, outside of the obvious direct benefit it would provide their customers.

[analog31]

In the past, the pharmaceutical companies were big enough to serve as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for these startups. Now Apple. On separate occasions, I've met two people who tried this, in two different start-ups, though it was a different kind of spectroscopy in each case.

The challenge is, there's no a priori proof that a method can't work, because the information you need to make that assertion has to come from the same kind of research as trying to make it work. So far the start-ups have all failed in the same way, which is that a signal that looks promising in a test tube can't be reliably distinguished from the myriad sources of variation in the living system.

Note that I'm not in any way discouraging the work, just offering some historical context for the problem space.

[bluGill]

The problem is we don't know if the proqlem is solvable. We get data of course but it needs to be accurate to be useful and that may or may not be possible.