We all agree that COVID has turned our lives upside down. Each one of us is now under house arrest and struggling to adapt to this new lifestyle of managing home and work simultaneously.

This new lifestyle has not only taken a toll on our physical health but also on our mental health. I am no different, with the added household responsibilities, it has become arduous for me to manage it along with the office work especially when it comes to maintain a grocery list. Every time a grocery item was missed out of the list, the task became more daunting.

I then turned to Alexa to track the shopping list for me. It was then when I thought to myself that what if we could have jars in our kitchen that would automatically maintain a grocery list and notify us? Wouldn’t that make life simpler and more interesting?

Here, I will explain the concept of Smart Kitchen and the major components required to implement this concept.

To maintain the list of grocery items which is running out, we would require a set of Smart Jars.

Smart Jar — which would digitally display the weight of the jar — would also be IoT-enabled and have the capability to send the weight change events to a cloud Smart Kitchen application.

Smart Kitchen Solution

Comprises five major components:

• Mobile App
• IoT Event Broker
• Weight Change Event Processor
• Notification Processor
• E-commerce API Integration

Mobile App

• Customer needs to install this app on their mobile device and register themselves
• Customer would be able to maintain the shopping list and the jars threshold value using mobile app
• Customer will receive push notifications for the grocery items which will be consumed shortly.
• Customer could define the preferred mode for communication that could be Sms, Email, or Alexa. Push Notification will be default mode.

Customer — Smart Jar AssociationEach Smart Jar comes with a unique id and a QR code. When the customer purchases Smart Jar from the vendor, she has to register the Jar with her Smart kitchen account using her mobile app’s QR Scan code feature. Once registered, she could define the Threshold Value of jar like 300gm or 500 gm depending upon the type and utility of the item. Lets say the customer purchased two Smart Jars of 2 Kg. In one jar, she is storing sugar, and in another, coffee beans. Consumption of sugar is more frequent than coffee beans so the Threshold value of coffee beans could be 300gm, but for sugar, it could be 500 gm. Once the customer consumes ≥1500gm sugar, she will receive a notification, and sugar will be added to her shopping list. Doesn’t it sounds cool?

IoT Event Broker

• It will capture all the events from IoT enabled Smart jars and publish it to an event store like Kafka for further processing.

To know how to set up IoT Event Broker refer my another article Capture IoT sensor’s data

Weight Change Event Processor

• Processor will process all the events
• Validate unique jarId and also validate its user association. Retreive user’s unique Id
• Check for the configuration value configured by User for that particular jar
• If weight change value does not meet the configured threshold value then it will reject the event otherwise consider it as an eligible item to purchase
• Event processor push eligible events into Purchase Event Streams for further processing

Notification Processor

• Notification service will read events from Purchase Event Stream to notify the user about an item to be purchased
• Notification Service will get user preferred notification channel. It could be SMS, Email, Push Notification, Alexa Notification
• It will send the notification to the user to take the necessary action.

E-Commerce API Integration

• Once user will get the notification, she could take possible actions like purchase it from her favourite e-commerce site or keep the item in her shopping list which again maintain by Smart Kitchen Mobile app.

There could be various possible B2B solutions for this Amazon cart integration — api2cart-amazon-integration would be one of these.

Possible Architecture Diagram

I am confident that if the above Smart Kitchen concept could be economically materialized into a real-time, solution it would bring the shift in the mindset of people.

Thanks for reading!

Hope you have enjoyed reading the article.