A Novel Low-Cost Intelligent Shopping Cart

An innovative product with societal acceptance is the one that aids the comfort, convenience and efficiency in everyday life. In this paper, we discuss a novel product “A Novel Low-Cost Intelligent Shopping Cart (NLISC)” being developed to assist a person in everyday shopping in terms of reduced time spent while purchasing a product at the best price available. The main objective of NLISC is to provide a technology oriented, low-cost, easily scalable, and rugged system for assisting shopping in-person. The developed system consists of 4 key components/modules (a) Location detection component (LDC) (b) Server Communication component (SCC) (c) User Interface and display component (UIDC), and (d) Automatic billing and Inventory management component (ABIMC). LDC is used to dynamically locate the shopping cart inside the shopping arena to facilitate providing relevant product information. SCC establishes and maintains the connection of the shopping cart with the main server. UIDC provides the user interface and ABIMC handles the billing and inventory management in association with the SCC. These 4 modules are integrated into an embedded system and are tested to satisfy the functionality. The prototype developed is ready for commercial deployment with proper attention to security and network issues as discussed.