Design and Implementation of the Smart Shopping Basket Based on IoT Technology

Abstract

Currently, during holidays and weekends in urban areas, a huge number of shoppers can be seen crowding into shopping malls and supermarkets. When there are special offers and huge discounts, the number of people increases even more. In supermarkets these days, consumers need a shopping cart or basket when making their purchases of various items. In addition, the process of procuring the products is rather complicated as the shoppers must carry a basket every time in order to find the products they want and place them into the basket, followed by needing to deal with the calculation of the expenses. After completing their shopping list, the consumers must wait in a long line so that they can check out and pay the bill. As a result, in order to solve this problem, this research presents the development of a smart basket that is used for shopping. All of the products in the supermarket normally have a barcode tag. Therefore, a barcode reader of android smart phone will be included on the smart basket. In this way, the name and the cost of each item will be shown on the display of the mobile phone when the customer scans and places the products in the basket. The total bill will be added up to give the total cost of all of the purchases and stored to the memory of the microcontroller. The product information regarding the items contained in the basket will be transferred to the main computer via a transmitter. Moreover, validation of the accuracy of the shopping process will be performed by a weight sensor system built into the basket. Thus, waiting in line to check out and pay the bill while having to estimate the total cost will be avoided.