Light propagation algorithms and spectroscopy developed for medicine can also be used to determine, for example, the condition of plants, the composition of food, the germ load of water, or the stratification of snow cover (for avalanche warning).

For process analysis, sensors are being developed at the ILM - through complete modeling of the light paths in the measurement volume - with which concentrations of constituents can be determined without the otherwise required tedilous and error-prone calibrations.