What were you up to at age 14?
The 2024 3M Young Scientist of the year Sirish Sabash stopped by TheStreet‘s studio at the New York Stock Exchange to show off his invention and explain how it could revolutionize the way average people shop for produce.
Transcript:
Sirish Sabash: It’s called PestiSCAND. It’s a device that allows people at home to detect pesticides on their fruits and vegetables, their produce. So the idea is the majority of produce items have pesticide residues on them, and these residues are harmful to health.
What’s worse is they stick around on produce even after washing. So if there was a way to detect them, we could avoid consuming them. So that’s the real reason behind this project.
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And along those lines, I built PestiSCAND. PestiSCAND is a handheld pesticide residue detector that works on. The basis in spectrophotometry.
So this is the setup. And the way it works is they turn it to the camera. Yeah, the way it works is the physical device will connect to an iOS app. And when the two are connected.
So you just launch the app. And then the two connect over Bluetooth. So once the app is launched, you simply tap ‘Scan’ while pointing at our produce item. In a couple seconds, the results come back up on screen.
So the fruit is over here. Yeah, so you point the fruit, you point this device at the fruit here, and then this device that you have connected to the phone reads the fruit and then you get a message that tells you whether it has pesticide or not.
