An API Centric Smart Kitchen Application

Abstract

With emerging technology, more automation is expected which can be used on a daily basis. In the future, most of the homes will be equipped with sensing and interaction services which would be used for monitoring, controlling and alarming giving users a new and a different experience. The aim of introducing smart technology in houses is for providing a better quality living to the residents by the integrating technology and services. These smart applications focus on safety, security, care and comfort while this paper focuses on comfort. One of the major issues today is to having many items in the kitchen but not knowing what to cook. This paper mainly addresses this issue by suggesting the appropriate recipes according to the food items present in the kitchen. Each food item is tagged using Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tag and is scanned using a RFID card reader. Based on the items scanned this application suggests a list of recipes that can be cooked from the food items available at that particular point of time. Design of Application Programming Interfaces (API) helps in reusability of modules across various applications. APIs minimize the need to understand every detail of the component that forms a building block by means of abstraction. The proposed paper is API centric since most of the functionality is accomplished through API calls thus realizing complete abstraction. The interaction between APIs is achieved through RESTful web services. Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style which runs over HTTP(HyperText Transfer Protocol) provides light weight communication and when web services use REST architecture they are called RESTful APIs. Another reason for using RESTful web services is that they are stateless and hence easily scalable. The flexibility of REST makes it extremely useful in providing consumer need specific message payloads and also assigning resources their Universal Resource Identifier (URI). Therefore, the proposed paper aims to develop APIs for smart kitchen enabling easy extensibility to other similar applications like smart health.