Could it be a device that costs $1? Connected to a mobile phone, the US will be a key tool to help solve the $1 trillion #food waste problem. GoMicro CEO and founder Dr. Sivam Krish says the answer is yes, thanks to the GoMicro Spotcheck app and a magnifying glass attached to your phone designed to accurately assess the maturity or deterioration level of fresh produce.

At his presentation at the 400M Agrifood Innovation Forum in Toowoomba, Queensland on 13 July, Dr Krish presented evidence that the GoMicro Spotcheck device can effectively read food spoilage accurately. Dr. Krish believes that GoMicro’s innovation, which provides greater accuracy through the application of superior image processing and artificial intelligence, can bring huge savings to our agriculture industry.

“We can assess the ripeness or spoilage of fruits and vegetables within days with 86-99% accuracy,” says Dr Krish. “This is a very urgent problem for the food industry because about 30% of our food spoils. We see a very strong commercial opportunity for a low-cost, portable device that can accurately assess food spoilage.”

Dr Krish says the GoMicro team took 100 images of a variety of vegetables each day to collect training images for the AI ​​program. Typically, AI programs require thousands of images for training and cannot achieve high accuracy in the field.

This is the latest big step forward for GoMicro, a microscopy 4.0 company based at Flinders University’s New Enterprise Institute, which started out as an Edtech company and evolved into an AgTech company in 2020. GoMicro won the Bayer Grants4Ag competition, leading to an ongoing relationship with Bayer Crop Sciences, and placed second in the Rocket Speeder FOOD WASTE+LOSS Accelerator Program 2021 competition.

GoMicro’s purpose – rethinking the microscope and giving it artificial intelligence – making top-quality technologies available to the public, not just scientists.

The company’s proprietary technology creates lab-quality imaging conditions that dramatically improve detection accuracy, reduce the number of images required for educational purposes, and result in the most accurate AI detection available at this magnification level.

GoMicro initially focused on agriculture to help farmers and agronomists detect pests, leaf diseases and accurately assess food quality.

Dr. “Any farmer with a phone will have the diagnostic capabilities of an agricultural engineer, thanks to a more accurate AI engine built into the Spotcheck microscope attached to the phone,” says Krish. “This is an important breakthrough because microscopic knowledge can provide a broad spectrum of knowledge on a wide variety of agricultural topics. More importantly, we will enable anyone to build and deploy accurate AI applications.”