OptiVerity · Precision Optical Measurement
Better measurements start with understanding the light.
OptiVerity began with a practical question: how accurately can you measure the light delivered by a red or near-infrared LED panel? What started as a calibration problem has become the LumMeter™, a portable optical measurement instrument now in development.
In Development
If you can’t measure it, you can’t trust it.
Where It Started
A calibration problem became an instrumentation project.
OptiVerity grew out of a practical task: calibrating a red and near-infrared light source to a known output.
Doing that properly required reference instrumentation and careful attention to wavelength, detector response, geometry, and calibration. Looking more closely at commercially available meters revealed a broader opportunity: affordable instruments can provide useful numbers, but those numbers depend strongly on what the detector was designed and calibrated to measure.
Laboratory optical instrumentation can provide much greater confidence and spectral information, but often at a cost and complexity that puts it outside many practical applications.
The LumMeter is being developed to occupy the space between those two extremes: portable and accessible, but built around rigorous calibration and a deeper understanding of the light being measured.
Current Development
More than a single irradiance reading.
The LumMeter’s present design combines complementary optical sensing methods with precision data acquisition so the instrument can be characterized rather than built around a single assumed measurement model.
Multiple optical detectors
Independent photodetectors with different spectral response characteristics provide multiple views of the same incident light.
Spectral information
A multi-channel spectral sensor adds wavelength-distribution information beyond a single broadband irradiance value.
Precision acquisition
High-resolution analog acquisition is being developed to preserve dynamic range and support calibration across the individual optical channels.
Measurement context
Distance and orientation data can help make measurements repeatable and provide useful context when comparing sources and operating conditions.
Applications
What matters is the energy delivered, in the wavelengths that count.
Whether the target is tissue or a crop canopy, the useful question is the same: how much optical energy arrives at the target, in which spectral bands, at the position where it’s actually used. The LumMeter combines spectral information with measured distance to determine how optical energy is distributed across wavelength bands at the position you use, so delivered energy follows directly.
Energy delivered (J/cm²) = irradiance (W/cm²) × time (s)
Red & NIR Light Therapy
Photobiomodulation research specifies dose in J/cm² at defined wavelengths. The LumMeter doesn’t just tell you how bright a panel is. It answers the practical question: at this distance, how long does it take to reach your target dose? You can then compare a session with the doses used in published studies rather than with a panel’s spec sheet.
Horticulture
Plants respond to light delivered in particular spectral bands, including red and far-red beyond the PAR range. The LumMeter is designed to report photon flux per band (µmol/m²/s) as well as energy, so you can see what each part of the spectrum delivers to the canopy, not just a single PPFD number.
Panels & Fixtures
A single center-point reading doesn’t describe a light source. The LumMeter app guides measurements across the emitting surface, overlays the resulting irradiance map on a photo of your panel or fixture, and shows how the field changes with distance.
Why Measurement Is Hard
A number is only useful if you know what produced it.
Different optical instruments answer different questions. A meter is not “wrong” simply because it was designed for a different spectral range, detector response, or calibration model.
Conventional Approach
Lux meters, solar meters, spectrometers, laboratory photodiodes, and optical power meters can all provide useful information — but each is optimized for a particular measurement problem.
The LumMeter Approach
The LumMeter combines complementary detectors, spectral information, precision electronics, and per-unit calibration to provide a more complete portable optical measurement.
Calibration
How each LumMeter will be calibrated.
A reading is only as trustworthy as the calibration chain behind it. This is the process being built for every unit.
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01
Traceable reference
Calibration is anchored to a NIST-traceable reference meter, so every LumMeter reading ties back to a recognized standard rather than to another consumer meter.
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02
Spectral response correction
Each detector channel’s response is characterized across wavelength. Readings are corrected for the spectrum of the source being measured instead of assuming a single wavelength. Single-wavelength and broadband meters skip this step, and that’s why their readings on multi-wavelength LEDs can differ substantially.
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03
Per-unit calibration
Every unit is calibrated individually on a dedicated fixture against a broadband reference source. The resulting coefficients belong to that unit.
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04
Geometry and distance
The offset between the distance sensor and the detector’s optical surface is accounted for, so each reading is tied to the actual distance from the source.
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05
Honest uncertainty
When the app builds a field map from your scan, it reports how well the model fits the readings and says plainly that a good fit isn’t an independent accuracy check.
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06
Published performance
Measured accuracy will be published once calibration is complete.
Follow Development
The LumMeter is moving into calibration and validation.
Optical calibration, detector characterization, firmware, and application development are ongoing. Final specifications will be published as validation is completed.
- Optical calibration and detector characterization
- Spectral-response evaluation
- Measurement repeatability and geometry
- Red/NIR and horticultural application testing