3S-cart: A Lightweight, Interactive Sensor-Based Cart for Smart Shopping in Supermarkets

Nowadays, shopping has played a key role in our economic activity. It deserves investigation how to provide smart shopping by promptly interacting with customers in supermarkets. This paper proposes a sensor-based smart shopping cart (3S-cart) system by using the context-aware ability of sensors to detect the behavior of customers, and respond to them in real time. A prototype of 3S-cart is implemented by encapsulating modularized sensors in a box to be put on shopping carts. Thus, 3S-cart is lightweight and easy to deploy. We also demonstrate two supermarket applications by 3S-cart. In the sales-promotion application, each cart checks if its customer has interest in some products and shows sales information at once to increase the purchasing desire. In the product-navigation application, a customer asks the system to find an unhindered, shortest path to comfortably obtain the desired product. This paper contributes in exploiting the sensor technology to provide interactive shopping in supermarkets, and addressing the prototyping experience and potential applications of the proposed 3S-cart system.