Abstract |
Meal preparation is undoubtedly an important daily activity for the vast majority of
individuals. Not only because food is essential for our survival, since it offers the necessary
nutrients to our body, but also due to the fact that cooking is a pleasant activity offering
multiple benefits (e.g. leisure, relaxation, creativity, training). Nevertheless, cooking is not
straightforward; on the contrary, it constitutes a complicated process, which entails
intuition, self-organization, coordination, monitoring and execution of multiple tasks
simultaneously, while it depends on the cook’s ability to manage (even with great
precision) the necessary time constraints. Given the iterative nature of cooking, along
with its complexity and importance, various attempts have been made to enhance the
cooking process, by devising technological solutions. Especially during the last few years,
an abundance of smart devices, objects and services have been gradually integrated in a
non-intrusive and often transparent way into domestic environments, offering various
opportunities to the inhabitants.
The AmIChef platform is a context-sensitive cooking system that supports the resident of
an Intelligent Home while preparing a meal in the kitchen, by providing interactive,
multimodal, intuitive, and personalized support, while simplifying the overall process by
reducing the user’s mental load. The user, interacts with the technological equipment of
the Smart Kitchen, which mainly consists of large interactive displays, in order to: a)
browse recipes, b) manage kitchen inventory, c) plan meals, and d) navigate across
previously prepared meals.
AmIChef enables users to initially browse through automatically curated lists of recipes
(based on their personal profile), then customize them according to their preferences,
and finally execute them while receiving real-time feedback with respect to the steps,
ingredients, utensils, time, and actions to be taken. In particular, AmIChef, for each step,
presents the ingredients and the cooking utensils users have to collect from the
surrounding environment along with the actions they need to perform. The AmIChef’s
objective is to ensure that a user can prepare a meal easily, quickly, safely and efficiently.
This thesis: (a) presents an approach towards supporting the meal preparation process
from the perspective of intelligent environments; (b) reports on existing systems
highlighting their shortcomings and the potential for improvements; (c) describes the
adopted design methodology and the functionality of AmIChef; and (d) documents the
results of a series of expert-based evaluation in the context of an Intelligent Home.
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