How to effectively manage the grocery list in the era of digitalisation!? š¤
Conceptualisation of IoT Enabled Smart Kitchen.
We all agree that Covid has turned our lives upside down. Each one of us is now house arrest and struggling to adapt to this new lifestyle of managing home and work simultaneously.
This new lifestyle has not only taken a toll on our physical health but also on our mental health. I am no different, with the added household responsibilities, it has become arduous for me to manage it along with the office work especially when it comes to maintain a grocery list. Every time a grocery item was missed out of the list, the task became more daunting.
I then turned to Alexa to track the shopping list for me. It was then when I thought to myself that what if we could have jars in our kitchen that would automatically maintain grocery list and notify us? Wouldnāt that make life more simpler š interesting isnāt??
Here I will explain about the concept of Smart Kitchen and about the major components required to implement this concept.
To maintain the list of grocery items which is going out, we would require set of Smart Jars.
Smart Jar ā which would digitally display the weight of the jar.
It would also be IOT enabled and have the capability to send the weight change events to cloud Smart Kitchen application.
Smart Kitchen Solution
Comprises five major components :
- Mobile App
- IoT Event Broker
- Weight Change Event Processor
- Notification Processor
- E-commerce API Integration
Mobile App
- Customer need to install this app on their mobile device and register themselves
- Customer would be able to maintain the shopping list and the jars threshold value using mobile app
- Customer will receive push notifications for the grocery items which will be consumed shortly.
- Customer could define preferred mode for communication that could be Sms, Email or Alexa. Push Notification will be default mode.
Customer ā Smart Jar Association
Each Smart Jar comes with a unique id and a QR code. When the customer purchases Smart Jar from the vendor, she has to register the Jar with her Smart kitchen account using her mobile appās QR Scan code feature. Once registered she could define the Threshold Value of jar like 300gm or 500 gm depending upon the type and utility of the item.
Lets say : customer purchased two Smart Jars of 2 Kg . In one jar she is storing sugar and in another coffee beans. Consumption of sugar is more frequent than coffee beans so the Threshold value of coffee beans could be 300gm but for sugar it could be 500 gm. Once customer consumes ā„1500gm sugar she will receive a notification and plus sugar will be added to her shopping list. Doesnāt it sounds cool š.
IoT Event Broker
- It will capture all the events from IoT enabled Smart jars and publish it to event store like kafka for further processing.
To know how to set up IoT Event Broker refer my another article mentioned below.
Weight Change Event Processor
- Processor will process all the events
- Validate unique jarId and also validate its user association. Retreive userās unique Id
- Check for the configuration value configured by User for that particular jar
- If weight change value does not meet the configured threshold value then it will reject the event otherwise consider it as an eligible item to purchase
- Event processor push eligible events into Purchase Event Streams for further processing
Notification Processor
- Notification service will read events from Purchase Event Stream to notify the user about an item to be purchased
- Notification Service will get user preferred notification channel. It could be SMS, Email, Push Notification, Alexa Notification
- It will send the notification to the user to take the necessary action.
E-commerce Api integration
- Once user will get the notification, she could take possible actions like purchase it from her favourite e-commerce site or keep the item in her shopping list which again maintain by Smart Kitchen Mobile app.
There could be various possible B2B solutions for this Amazon cart integration ā api2cart-amazon-integration would be one of these.
Possible Architecture Diagram
I am confident that if the above Smart Kitchen concept could be economically materialised into a real time solution it would bring the shift in the mindset of millenials.
Thanks for reading !
Hope you have enjoyed reading the article.
We mentioned Alexa notification in this article. Refer below article to understand Alexa Proactive event notification api behaviour.
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