Activities

No upcoming events

Intelligent Systems Lab Project: "Visualization and energy efficiency optimization of cooking procedures"

Participants

• Falk Altheide
• Timo Dankert
• Sebastian Kahl
• Fabian Vöhl

Supervisors

• Andreas Kipp

Motivation

• Users often face the problem to be focused on on a cooking task like preparing ingredients and at the same time keep in mind the progress of e.g. another already cooking substitute of a menu.
• Most of the time, this is not a problem but with a more complex menu at hand, things can get confusing.
• The last thing the chef thinks about while performing highly demanding tasks is how energy efficient his or her cooking is.
• In normal room environments there are no supporting devices and tools for this problem.
• An Intelligent room could help to solve this problem by providing a smartphone application, which can track currently running tasks by utilizing a database of recipes.
• It not only contains information about the needed ingredients and a full text of cooking procedures, but also a more machine readable list of procedures.
• With these procedures, the application can keep track of when to start and end a cooking task and inform the user about their progress by means of sonification and visual information.
• To optimize the energy efficiency of the cooking process, efficiency hints can be displayed for the user to read.
• The advantage of using an Android phone for this application instead of something permanently installed in the kitchen is, that you can easily leave the kitchen during the cooking procedure.
• Nevertheless you stay informed about what is going on and when you need to return in order to perform the next cooing task.

Application Szenario

• The user starts the application on his cell phone and logs in with his account.
• The application presents a list of recipes the user can choose from.
• An overview of the chosen recipe is shown with ingredients and descriptions of the cooking steps.
• The user starts the cooking procedure and is guided through the recipe step by step.
• During the procedure hints are shown to help the user save energy.
• Also a graph is displayed to show the currently used energy.

Objectives

The project goals are

• Build an Android application with a backend of recipes that is also utilized by other projects.
• The application should contain a graphical user interface for navigating the list of recipes.
• Access to the stoves's API in order to regulate it based on the user's input.
• Synchronize separate cooking tasks (e.g. pasta and pasta sauce), between which can be switched.
• Backgrounding of the application, so that the user is still able to multitask.
• Send alert messages to the smartphone.
• Once a recipe is selected, an overview of the cooking procedures will be given with a vague time table of how long the cooking tasks will take.
• The application will know the status of the cooking pot by using sensor information that could be provided by the project "Der intelligente Topf".
• For other relevant status updates, the user will need to mark displayed cooking tasks as "finished".
• Once all preliminary tasks are finished, the cooking can start and the application will inform the user by a visual progress bar and sonified status information.
• Along the progress bar, important events during the cooking process are marked and information about the event can be displayed.
• Also, the user should be informed of optimizing the energy efficiency of the cooking process by displaying efficiency hints that are embedded in the application's GUI.
• Due to applied efficiency hints estimated energy savings will be displayed (also money savings).

Description

The project consists of two parts, the client application on the phone and a back end server. XMPP is used for the communication between server and client, so the server application is based on an XMPP server. It handles the user accounts and all the information from synergy projects is gathered here and then sent to the phone.

The client application on the phone gets the information from the server and then displays it for the user in a suitable form. There are different windows depending on the cooking step the user has to deal with at the moment: One window for the login into the application, one for an overview over all available recipes, another for the cooking steps and a last that displays the used energy and shows the high-score position.

Results

• Fully functional client/server architecture has been realized.
• A GUI prototype has been built, showing all the relevant informations we already mentioned in the application scenario section.
• Synergies with other project groups are established, but not fully implemented due to a lack of time at the end of the project.

Demonstration video:

The video shows how our application assists us cooking Spaghetti Napoli.

Discussion and Conclusion

• While cooking, our application can help the chef performing every single cooking task.
• Also, it motivates the user saving energy by competition with other users. Once finished cooking, he can see his position in a crowd-sourced-ranking of all cooking events.

Outlook

• Publish the application on Google Market, so other people all over the world can use it.
• Perform a user study to test and improve the usability of the application.