"Optical Analysis based on Near-InfraRed Spectroscopy for Nutrition Monitoring, Food Scanning and Industrial Applications"

New food analysis enabling approaches offer significant advantages over traditional methods in terms of test speed, control, low cost, ease-of-operation, and data management, and require minimal equipment and user involvement. Among them, Near InfraRed Spectroscopy has a great potential for providing a user-friendly, scanning on-the-go scenario. It indeed allows peculiar rapid multi-component non-invasive and non-destructive analysis, and is a greener alternative to reagent-based analytical technique; no need for reagents and limited waste after the analysis. All these advantages, together with a progressive reduction of system cost and size, make it a very promising methodology in terms of range of applicability, with high scientific and commercial impact. However, being a target-nonspecific method, it must be associated with complex multivariate statistical and chemometric tools for spectral dataset analysis to extract relevant chemical information. Indeed, calibration and tuning of the systems are performed according to the desired application. Moreover, in a view to simplify apparatus and decrease cost, critical design criteria are represented by the proper selections of the wavelength range for source and detector, and of the measurement setup. In this work we describe a multi-platform optimized analytical method based on the most informative wavelength range in the NIR region for quantitative measurement of sugar content in aqueous solutions and beverages by means of absorbance spectroscopy. The achieved results were then profitably exploited as a cue for design and as a reference for comparison to develop a simplified LED-based optical platform for sugar content measurement in beverages. The proposed analytical and sensor solution was conceived for tracking dietary sugar intake in liquid foods, as e-health technological answer for the serious and widespread problem of unwitting over-intake of sugar, far above the recommended assumption, and also as a possible diet companion platform for dietary control of diabetes patients.