Everybody will eventually have spectrometers in their homes

Everybody will eventually have spectrometers in their homes, in their pockets, and on their wrists. These are highly likely to be infrared spectrometers because of one important characteristic: although infrared spectroscopy is far from the most sensitive technique, it is highly selective. That means broad applicability. When we dream about home spectrometers our attention usually turns to health tracking. Rather than ceding authority to third parties, the dream of self health is to build self-efficacy in individuals by putting them in the driver seat. Spectroscopy can play an important role, and has done already to a limited degree. It is early days. Someone asked Willie Sutton why he robs banks and he said "because that's where the money is." I have focused on blood, because that's where the health information is. 60-80% of all clinical decisions are made either exclusively by or aided by blood chemistry data. 90% of healthcare spending is spent in caring for people with chronic conditions, about $3.7T in the US alone, and so it seems this is where we should focus. In 2021 we launched a home spectrometer to measure transmission SWIR spectra from whole blood and plasma. In this talk I will report on what we learned and mistakes we made. The dream of self health is to provide data to affect lifestyle change. We can expect spectroscopy to play an ever-increasingly important role in this quest.