Asbestos doesn't work like that. If you don't touch it, you're fine. You can live your whole life in asbestos building and be safe. You may even be worse off if you decide to get rid of it and start tearing down walls.

So it's good that it's banned, but if there's no reason to touch it, you're just making a tinfoil hat. There's more harm from the fear of it.

This needs to join the families of devices that find wooden studs, electrical wiring, and plumbing. This is a general purpose technology. It can be reprogrammed to find other things. It should be in a blister-pack at Home Depot if it can be made cheaply, and in a hard case at Tool Town if it can't.

Unless I missed something, it seems the "POC" device still made no effort to address this, which is the core feature — it just demonstrated classifying some other common materials. If that's true then the conclusions make no sense to me - why would customers be lining up if you still haven't proven the actual concept?

I'm sure this can be annoying when people do this, but I can't help myself lol. I wonder if you could operate in a different modality and find discontinuities in material properties rather than use it as a classifier. For some reason skin cancer detection popped into my head, but general purpose inspection/detection cases for any discontinuities might be pretty helpful. Depending on the resolution/size of the field it's inspecting a realtime camera overlay might be interesting for correlation sake.

Does it also work through other materials. i.e. through a drywall etc.

very cool project