TupperwareEarth: Bringing Intelligent User Assistance to the “Internet of Kitchen Things”

Abstract

Smart devices have entered all spheres of modern living, from monitoring the steps we walk to managing refrigerator inventory, ushering in the dawn of a new urban experience. The kitchen is the heart of the home; a place to share, care for and nurture the family unit, but also a place seeing the greatest impact from the introduction of smart devices. The smart sensing and remote control capability of smart appliances have enabled great physical convenience for users but have had less impact on cognitive conveniences. While such devices can sense <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">what</i> they are working with, they fail to understand <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">who</i> they are working for, leaving much of the burden of trivial planning and decision making to humans with less personalized services. Hence, we introduce TupperwareEarth, a knowledge-based ontological semantic network for the “Internet of Kitchen Things” with the aim of reducing physical as well as cognitive loads of humans in cooking tasks. Also, we present a testbed for exploring kitchen innovation and validating the effectiveness of TupperwareEarth that combines intelligent kitchen storage containers, Smart Tupperware, and existing smart kitchen appliances through an Internet of Things network and a user-friendly front-end interface, Tuppy. Using this testbed, the quantitative user studies show a 33% reduction in average food preparation time and qualitative user surveys show that 75% of the users observed a significant reduction in cognitive loads, thereby validating the cognitive conveniences granted by TupperwareEarth.