Preventing food waste by the shelf-life dynamical control in Smart Homes

Currently, smart homes are designed and improved according to four main goals: residents' wellness, security, comfort, and reduced energy waste. No focus has yet been reserved for one of the most impacting problems of the recent years: the domestic food waste. In this context, this paper proposes a case study that jointly involves recent advances in smart home and the need for food waste reduction. The proposed system is divided into two main blocks: the sensing block and the actuation one. The sensing block consists of multiple nodes, which in the proposed case study, work as dynamic labels being sticked to the good to be monitored. Each node embeds, on a miniaturized board, a set of sensors (i.e., temperature, humidity, and ambient light), whose outcomes are used to extract, on-board, the dynamic food shelf-life (SL). The presence of on-board inertial measurement unit also permits the nodes localization inside the environment. If sudden decrease in the food SL is recorded by the node and no human interventions occur in a preset timeout, the node is designed to send a call for intervention to the actuation block. In this paper, the actuation block is realized through an assistive robotic platform that can gather coordinates of food from sensor nodes, navigate to them to manipulate the goods, and actuate actions to improve their preservation conditions (increasing the perspective shelf life). The actuation block is also responsible of notifying the user of the bad storage conditions. The system has been experimentally tested in laboratory environment. The whole mitigation chain successfully completed all the operations through the robotic platform in the 60% of cases. Moreover, comparing a food left in poor storage conditions and the same food managed by the here proposed system, an improvement of the food expiration date of ∼55% (on average) has been recorded.