SS16 – Know What’s in Your Fridge – Kitchen Buddy

Nowadays, people face two main problems in the kitchen. Firstly, not knowing what’s in their fridge when planning to shop. Secondly, not knowing when food has gone bad. Utilising IoT technology, we designed Kitchen Buddy to address these. Kitchen Buddy, a smart fridge, performs various functions and is connected to a mobile app for controlling. Firstly, how do we know what’s in the fridge? Users may simply click on the app to check stored food in it. After receiving a request, Kitchen Buddy will turn on lighting inside the fridge, and cameras installed on each layer of the fridge will start to scan, then pictures processed by computer vision will recognise what food is stored in each layer. Finally, the phone would receive the results . Then, how do we detect whether food has gone bad? Kitchen Buddy adopts a bacteria scanning technology developed by the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Bacteria on surfaces accumulate as food goes bad.This technology uses lasers to detect bacterial contamination. Once it is scanned, the addressed food will be recognized by computer vision and notifications would be sent to notify the user of food about to turn bad.