CloudFridge: A Testbed for Smart Fridge Interactions

• Published in: arXiv.org 2014-01
• Main Authors: Sandholm, Thomas, Lee, Dongman, Tegelund, Bjorn, Han, Seonyeong, Shin, Byoungheon, Kim, Byoungoh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Intrusion; Object recognition
• ISSN: 2331-8422

We present a testbed for exploring novel smart refrigerator interactions, and identify three key adoption-limiting interaction shortcomings of state-of-the-art smart fridges: lack of 1) user experience focus, 2) low-intrusion object recognition and 2) automatic item position detection. Our testbed system addresses these limitations by a combination of sensors, software filters, architectural components and a RESTful API to track interaction events in real-time, and retrieve current state and historical data to learn patterns and recommend user actions. We evaluate the accuracy and overhead of our system in a realistic interaction flow. The accuracy was measured to 83-88% and the overhead compared to a representative state-of-the-art barcode scanner improved by 27%. We also showcase two applications built on top of our testbed, one for finding expired items and ingredients of dishes; and one to monitor your health. The pattern that these applications have in common is that they cast the interaction as an item-recommendation problem triggered when the user takes something out. Our testbed could help reveal further user-experience centric interaction patterns and new classes of applications for smart fridges that inherently, by relying on our testbed primitives, mitigate the issues with existing approaches.