Everyone will soon be able to tell if a fruit is ripe or not, because of the new handheld device which is developed by MIT researchers, including one of Indian origin will be launched.
The device is capable to evaluate how ripe the fruit is by further measuring the glow of chlorophyll in the fruit’s skin under the ultraviolet light.
Such a gadget can make a big difference for the apple distributors, who sometimes have to guess when deciding where to send their stock, researchers said.
Testing ripeness would be also helpful to farmers, who can then decide the best time to harvest their crops.
Device that can tell if a fruit is ripe
“There’s a tremendous amount of wastage,” as per Anshuman Das, a postdoctoral researcher in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Media Lab.
One solution could be to further analyze apples using a spectrometer, which measures the brightness of light at specific wavelengths.
However, current spectrometers tend to be a too big and expensive, tabletop-size device, which makes them not practical for most of the apple sellers and farmers.
The riper an apple is, the dimmer will be the glow from the chlorophyll, the researchers said.
When the spectrometer picks up the light from the apple, it sends the data to an Android phone app via Bluetooth that compares it to a previous database of what an apple should be like at given stages of ripeness, ‘Live Science’ reported.
The user can then see how many days the apple has been ripening from a baseline amount.
For example, the spectrometer can say an apple has been ripening for 10 days, and that means that a batch of 10-day-old apples should be shipped out before the three-day-old ones do, and ideally, they should be sent to stores nearby.
