The performance of consumer-grade near infrared spectrometer in traditional Chinese medicine

Technical advances in instrument manufacturing have promoted the miniaturization and cost reduction of portable NIR spectrometers. The price of a device is now affordable to ordinary consumers, which might promotes the application of NIRS in real scenarios. Generally, the portable spectrometers have a lower spectral resolution and a narrower spectral region compared with the benchtop ones. Whether the consumer grade portable spectrometers is good enough for basic analysis in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) remains unclear. Two real world applications were introduced in this work to evaluate the capability of consumer grade spectrometers solving complex problems. Spectra collected on bark samples were used to test the qualitative performance of the spectrometer. The result showed that the cross validation error of the hierarchical FDA (Fisher Discrimination Analysis) models was at most 0.0769. For the quantitative analysis, spectra of pharmaceutical powder were used to train a model to predict the moisture of new individual sample. The RPD (the Ratio of Performance to Deviation) value of the moisture model was 6.83. These results demonstrated the usability of the models built on NIRS data measured by consumer grade spectrometer.