As a tuber crop with the same origin as medicine and food, yam is becoming more and more favored by people. With the development of yam processing industry, rapid non-destructive testing and grading of yam quality is of great practical significance to the healthy development of the industrial chain. For the purpose of developing a multi-quality non-destructive rapid detection device for yam, based on the principle of visible / near-infrared local diffuse transmission, a special detection probe for yam was designed according to the special appearance characteristics of yam, and a hand-held multi-quality nondestructive testing device for yam was developed by designing the optical path through comparative experiments. The overall dimensions of the device were 150 mm × 80 mm × 150 mm and the weight was about 590 g. Based on the spectral information of 150 yams collected by the R&D device, the collected spectra were corrected by multiplicative scatter correction ( MSC ), and then the characteristic wavelengths were screened by the shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) to establish partial least squares regression (PLSR) prediction model of dry matter, starch and protein content of yams, the correlation coefficients of the validation set of dry matter, starch and protein were 0.965 3, 0.967 5 and 0.956 3, respectively, and the root mean square errors were 1.09% , 0.83% and 0.15% , respectively. Based on the Qt development tool, the real-time analysis and control software was written in C language, and the prediction model was implanted into the device for external verification. The dry matter, starch and protein contents of 50 yam samples not participating in the modeling were detected five times by using the R&D device, and the coefficients of variation were 1.0% ~ 1.2% , 1.5% ~ 1.7% and 1.4% ~ 1.6% , respectively. The absolute values of the maximum residuals of the dry matter, starch and protein of 50 yam samples were 1.83% , 1.64% and 0.26% , respectively. The results showed that the handheld yam multi-quality non-destructive testing device can meet the needs of real-time detection in the field.