KITCHEN MANAGER: Your shopping and Food Inventory Made Easy

1. KITCHEN MANAGER: Your shopping and Food Inventory Made Easy STEPHANIE AHN, LINA ALAOUI, JAMES DEEN, FEI YE GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY FRIDGE INTERFACE MOBILE APPLICATION INTERFACE BACKGROUND The Kitchen Manager is a smart food inventory management system for tracking food. This inventory system tracks food coming into the household and when it is discarded. This is done through two methods: 1. Items are added to the home’s inventory by linking right up to the store. So a user buys something and it is automatically added to the users inventory either by integrating into credit cards or loyalty cards. 2. Items are deleted from the home’s inventory by a smart trashcan. The trash has camera located around the rim which when combined with image recognition allows the system to recognize when items are discarded. Tracked discarded items are combined with the user’s habits which can be used to automatically build a grocery shopping list. This shopping list can either be printed out or ordered (via a screen in the fridge door) for pick up right from the grocery store. Buying items will of course add them back to the inventory list. So by taking the focus away from one appliance like other inventions have done our idea focuses on the whole system (The home inventory, the store, and the trash can). The mobile application is mainly used to view a shopping list and send it to the store for scheduled pick up. The screenshots below show the mobile interface used to browse the shopping list items. Items are ordered by category or alphabetically. Similarly to the fridge interface, it allows the user to select a pick up time when sending an order to the store. The Fridge inventory is organized in four alternative views. The “Picture “view graphically displays the items in the fridge. Each item has a corresponding icon. The “A – Z” view organizes the inventory items alphabetically. The “Category” view organizes the items in logical groups such as dairy, beverage, meat, vegetables, etc… Finally, the “By Date” view shows the items based on the date they were purchased and added to the inventory. DISCUSSION AND NEXT STEPS The Shopping list is organized into two alternative views. The “A – Z” view and the “Category” view. The categorization view would help the shopper efficiently shop at the store. When we started this project, we considered several options for the actual tracking of food items in the fridge or more general in the kitchen. While we decided to focus on designing an interface for the scope of this project, we had evaluated technology options for inputting items into the inventory and removing them: Items input: integration from store frequent shopper card database, scanning RFID tags, QR codes or barcodes on food items. Items output: image recognition of food item or scanning RFID tags, QR codes or barcodes on food items. Suggested next steps for this project would be to chose on of these technologies and develop a prototype for tracking the food items in a database. PROJECT SCOPE For the purposes of this project, we decided to focus on designing the interface of this system. We have designed the fridge screen interface as well as an interface for a mobile application. The mobile application can be used when the user is on the go (not home or at the store) and wants to pull out the shopping list. The Kitchen Manager mobile application has the same functionality as the fridge mounted Kitchen Manager application. The interface has three main components: a fridge inventory, view, a shopping list view and an order pick up view. BIBLIOGRAPHY The Fridge inventory item list is updated when new items are purchased. [1] SuhuaiLuo, Hongfeng Xia, Yuan Gao, Jesse S. Jin, and RukshanAthauda. 2008. Smart Fridges with Multimedia Capability for Better Nutrition and Health. In Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on Ubiquitous Multimedia Computing (UMC '08). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 39-44. DOI=10.1109/UMC.2008.17 [2] Laurel Swan and Alex S. Taylor. 2005. Notes on fridge surfaces. In CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1813-1816. DOI=10.1145/1056808.1057029 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1056808.1057029 [3] 'Smart' Fridge Will Even Order Groceries - Machine Design 69(15) 44 Aug 7, 1997 [4] Designing Technology for Domestic Spaces - A kitchem Manifesto - The Journal of Food and Culture http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jofish/writing/gastronomica24.pdf [5] Ki-sung Hong, HyoungJoong Kim, Chulung Lee, "Automated Grocery Ordering Systems for Smart Home," fgcn, vol. 2, pp.87-92, Future Generation Communication and Networking (FGCN 2007) - Volume 1, 2007. DOI [6] Judy E. Scott and Carlton H. Scott. 2008. Online Grocery Order Fulfillment Tradeoffs. In Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS '08). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 90-. DOI=10.1109/HICSS.2008.335 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2008.335 The Order pick up view allows the user to send an order to the store, and view the details of a sent order.