KITCHEN MANAGER: Your shopping and Food Inventory Made Easy
STEPHANIE AHN, LINA ALAOUI, JAMES DEEN, FEI YE
GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
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).
PROJECT SCOPE
FRIDGE INTERFACE
MOBILE APPLICATION INTERFACE
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Order pick up view allows the user to send an order to the
store, and view the details of a sent order.
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Fridges with Multimedia Capability for Better Nutrition and Health. In Proceedings of the
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[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
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