For those who curse the tightly wrapped plastic packaging that seems to surround every piece of food or medication today, think back to why these packaging rules were created.

The Tylenol medication tampering scare from 1982, which led to seven deaths when someone laced already bottled capsules with potassium cyanide, led to a complete revolution in how such items are packaged. The new types of packages were designed to prove that no one could possibly have tampered with them after they left the factory.

Of course, that doesn’t ease your frustration as you spend too much time trying to grab and peel the tiny tabs on the seal for your jar of mustard.

Now, though, technology may lead to an easier way to find impurities, both in consumer products designed for consumption and in various manufacturing processes. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques in FHR – Fraunhofer FHR for short – have developed a method of scanning objects without the need to be intrusive.

The SAMMI – short for Stand Alone MilliMeter wave Imager – uses millimeter waves to scan non-metallic objects, looking for impurities. SAMMI’s scanning is somewhat similar to x-ray scanning, but, by using millimeter waves, SAMMI is much more sensitive and can spy more types of even miniscule impurities.

The researchers mention the ability of SAMMI to scan a piece of chocolate, allowing it to pick out air bubbles or some object or ingredient that doesn’t belong. This could allow federal regulators to ensure that the food is packaged as company says it is, without having to open the packages, or it could help regulators more accurately grade the quality of a food product.

On a more serious note, it could find any particles inside food that don’t belong or find explosive particles inside a package or envelope that’s been mailed. SAMMI almost certainly would have spotted the poison inserted into the Tylenol capsules 30 years ago, for example.

However, SAMMI’s potential successes also showcase the problem with this idea: How do you make a scanning device small enough, fast enough, and cheap enough to actually be effective, considering the way shopping works? After all, to have found the Tylenol poison, the bottles would have had to have been scanned at the time of purchase, because it’s believed that the unknown assailant poisoned the capsules as they were on store shelves.

The SAMMI device has the kind of size that would make it easy to deploy almost anywhere, but its speed isn’t where it needs to be yet, and the potential costs are unknown right now. SAMMI is only about the size of a laser printer, but it currently can scan an area that’s only about one square foot in a minute. The researchers certainly will improve the speed of SAMMI going forward, which will be a necessity to make it it a useful device. Eventually, the researchers say they envision SAMMI sensors working over a conveyor belt type of design, allowing the unit to scan a much larger area in a shorter amount of time, maybe similar to the x-ray scanning devices used in airport security.

Without that increased speed, it’s doubtful that we’ll see SAMMI devices replacing x-ray machines any time soon. With the more precise sensitivity with SAMMI, though, the Fraunhofer FHR researchers may be on the verge of creating a special device. A few more tweaks, and we could end up with a device that could make the world safer.

In an age were concerns over varying methods of terrorist attacks are a constant way of life, the ability to scan materials would be great … as long as it can be done quickly and cheaply. SAMMI isn’t there yet, but it’s a promising idea. Figuring out whether the researchers can deliver on that promise, however, will be much tougher to see than that air bubble in the chocolate bar that SAMMI spies.