With the people getting more conscious about their health, they often tend to avoid extra cautious ingredients. The delish cuisine food labeled under gluten free options may relieve us with an impression of healthy intake. But you never know when any secret ingredient may break your stubborn diet rules. Also, allergies can put your health into heavy risk. 6Sensor Labs has brought a solution to this with its portable food sensing console – Nima sensor.
Nima sensor detects gluten in your diet
Nima sensor is a portable, Bluetooth-connected device that helps you make sure that your food is gluten free and allergen free. If not, it breaks the false perception you were having but giving a proper indication. The device is very simple to use – Drop a tiny sample of food in the cartridge and insert it into the handheld device. The device will analyze and let you know if there is any gluten in the food that is served to you.
The testing process
Unboxing the starter kit of Nima, you would see two product pieces. There is a cartridge and a palm-size 3.5-inch long sensor. You need to put a pea-size sample of the food into the cartridge and screw the lid in order to grind your sample. Fix the cartridge in the sensor and press the button the only button on it. This will mix the food with the solution present at the bottom of the cartridge. The mixture will thereby react with the test strip on the capsule to reach to a test conclusion. The sensor reads the result of the reaction on the screen.
The process of testing the presence of gluten takes around three minutes. After some whirring indication from the sensor, the test result pops up on the sensor’s OLED screen. If the amount of gluten is less than 20 ppm, a smiley face appears on the OLED screen. Otherwise, a wheat symbol appears on the screen. The Nima capsules are not recyclable and you can use it only once. So, if you do frequent testing, you have to drop $5 for every capsule.
The food sensing device uses Bluetooth to connect with an iOS app. The app keeps track of your test results and fetches guidance from review website Yelp. The company says that they are soon planning to develop the Android compatible app also.
The down lines
There are certain challenges in the process of gluten testing with the Nima testing device. The makers recommend keeping the food clear when you put it in the testing cylinder. There are chances of cross contamination due to the unhygienic environment like the plate or your hands or the table. So keeping the contaminants away from your sample is a tough job; but very significant.
Nima sensor does have certain down lines in the testing process. If you want to test a full box of cookies, you will add a sample of one unit into the tester. But there are chances that the other units may have certain proportion of gluten present. If due to any reason a single cookie is contaminated, then it would get difficult to analyze.
 Price and significance
The intake of purely nutritious and gluten-free diet is a primary concern of a huge mass. The growing awareness after the diagnosis of Celiac disease increased the demand for the gluten-free consumption. The Celiac disease can lead to damage in the small intestine due to the intake of high-gluten foods. The Celiac Disease Foundation estimates that 1 percent of the people worldwide currently suffer from that condition.
The product offers very much help for the gluten intolerant. However, it is pricey but getting the knowledge about what we are consuming is worth the penny. The starter kit of the pocket-size gluten sensor by 6Sensor Labs cost $279.