Clever fridges

[earthgecko]

I had the same idea some years ago. Clever fridges.

• Shelves check in and out it and weighs them (consumption rates)
• Barcode reader gets product data, batch number, expiry date, net weights, etc
• Prices, inflation rate, product price comparison by price
• Fridge learns what you use, when you need more and what you should not use (expired stuff) - alarm goes off, "Do not eat that" :)
• Fridge makes recommendations on what you should eat and tries to balance your diet.
• Fridge prints out or emails you your shopping list, but one day will just make an order and you will either pick it up or have it delivered, probably from multiple places as it will have selected the most efficient lowest cost routing for all your products and you will end up have to get say 12 products from 5 different stores.
• So the fridge and your car/phone/pedometer will need to sync up as the fridge needs to understand the all the variables to lowest cost shopping, including petrol or just kilometres accumulated it executing the proposed low cost routing shopping.

Fridges could be quite clever.

However, I am not holding my breathe. We advance our existing domestic appliances very slowly, relative many other things.

I had a conversation with my sister recently that demonstrated this issue quite nicely, relating to a Christmas tree mess and a vacuum cleaner. I thought it may be useful to share it with someone who is obviously thinking about accelerating the advancement of domestic appliances.

My sister:

Now I have had a bit of a rest I need to vacuum up all the mess caused from the tree But I don't mind because we have a new cordless Dyson vacuum cleaner :) It's really light and easy to use

Me:

Why can your cordless Dysan vacuum cleaner not see there is a mess and just do its job? Why does technology still need our help??? It is 2016 and the only improvement your new vacuum cleaner has over a 1970's one is that you do not have to move the cord around.....

My sister:

Don't forget lighter :)

Me:

I would not describe those as a GREAT technological advances

Anyway best of luck to you if you take this endeavour further, there is a lot of scope for improvements in this arena. However that said, there will probably need to be a lot of configuration options/settings relating to how much you want your fridge to do. I can see fridges getting on twitter and tweeting about what was taken out and what was just put in, with pictures. I personally would question this level of usefulness, but it seems like we eventually make everything tweet in the end, so it is probably inevitable. I hope some of these thoughts are useful to you if you decide to pursue the Fridge-Friend. I myself am not interested in developing clever domestic appliances, so these thoughts may be useful or helpful to someone that is :) Best of luck.

[GillesVandewiele]

Thank you for your remarks, there is still a lot of possible advances to be made before fridges can ever be considered 'smart'. For this to happen, the most important task has to be solved first: automatic recognition of products that enter and leave the fridge. This task is rather hard, even with the deep learning hype of today, it would require training with images for each possible product, and what to do about meat wrapped in papers by your butchers or left-overs that you store in the fridge?

This project was made during my first master-year together with 6 other students and has been idle since then unfortunately.