Kitchen Appliances

Digital home appliances often provide an excessive number of
functions. One way of improving interaction is to make redundant
functions disappear when we don t need them. Networked
appliances provide opportunities for understanding an overall
situation from multimodal sensor inputs. In a kitchen, office or lab,
people often use several appliances together or in sequence. The
kitchen is also the most dangerous space in the home and a good
place to test whether common sense improving real world
scenarios. Making appliances understand what a person or other
parts of the kitchen are doing might encourage the user aware of
the overall environment or smooth the working process across
various devices. KitchenSense creates a shared context to create
auxiliary controls and information that might streamline human
requirements for perception and action.
KitchenSense networks appliances and sensors under a central
common sense database to create a shared knowledge-base.
Individual appliance interfaces change based on how the kitchen
is being used. KitchenSense finds out the goals based on what the
users did and provides relevant functions for related kitchen
events.

In one example, someone opens the refrigerator to take out a piece
of cold pizza and walks to the microwave oven. A micro-switch
on the refrigerator senses that the door is open, and a proximity
sensor on the microwave detects that someone is standing in front
of it. The system infers that when a person uses the fridge and
then stands in front of the microwave, he/she has a high
probability of re-heating food (see Fig. 2). the microwave control
panel provides the reheat function predominantly on digital
projected control panel near the microwave.
Similar groupings of tasks from around the kitchen can be used to
make simpler control interfaces on the individual appliances. For
example, the dishwasher would likely only be able to be turned on
if it contains dirty dishes. The cook-top can provide temperature
controls based on the surface temperature of pans on the range.
Next, KitchenSense can enhance and augment cooking activities.
When someone is cooking, the system can suggest where to find
ingredients and appliances or even propose new techniques or
recipes. Appliances can furnish more information about
themselves if someone stands in front of them or operates them
erratically. KitchenSense can also be used to promote certain
behaviors, such as hygiene and energy conservation by varying
interaction based on where people are and what they are doing.