
Resonance
Signatures
Overview
Counterfeit, substandard, or contaminated consumables (e.g. food items, dietary supplements) are a major worldwide problem; global economic trends and the rapidly increasing volume of online purchases are creating untrusted supply chains for such products. Food items included packaged foods, and nutritional supplements are highly fraud-prone; they are not regulated as drugs and are highly diverse. For example, U.S. consumers used over 29,000 different supplements in 2005, of which sexual enhancement, body-building, and weight loss products were the top targets of recalls.
Today, about 30% of similar items have compositions that don’t match their labels, and a significant fraction are contaminated by compounds with adverse health consequences. High-value items such as packaged medicines are also highly prone to fraud. Thus, enormous positive health implications are possible if consumers were able to easily test their own commonly-purchased products. Our company's goal is to develop innovative chemometric authentication devices based on nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) spectroscopy that have the potential to significantly mitigate contamination and fraud of food items in modern distribution chain.
