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 recent years: domestic food waste. In this context, this letter proposes a case study that jointly involves recent advances in smart homes 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 stuck 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 an onboard inertial measurement unit also permits the nodes' localization inside the environment. If a 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 letter, 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 SL). The actuation block is also responsible for notifying the user of the bad storage conditions. The system has been experimentally tested in a laboratory environment. The whole mitigation chain successfully completed all the operations through the robotic platform in 60% of cases. Moreover, comparing food left in poor storage conditions and the same food managed by the our proposed system, an improvement of the food expiration date of ∼55% (on average) has been recorded.