A virtual chef that tracks food supplies in fridges and cupboards with cameras and scales to suggest recipes is being developed to stop food waste in the home.
The Lettuce Labs project hopes to prevent Londoners throwing out nearly 900,000 tonnes of food a year, and is among the creations of students at Imperial College’s Dyson School of Design Engineering.
The idea is based on a “connected kitchen”, where smart devices communicating over the internet keep track of ingredients, their quantity and when they go out of date.
It suggests what should be cooked and when to avoid waste. After learning household buying habits, the smart kitchen uses personal data to reorder supplies.
Unavoidable waste is stored in a worktop “caddy” that scans its chemical contents for matter that can be turned into fuel bricks for burning at a biogas renewable energy plant.
Lettuce Labs’ co-founder Joseph Shepherd said: “Our plan is to harness the power of data through internet-of-things devices to make it really easy for people to reduce food waste at home.
“The Connected Kitchen Kit entails smart cameras and scales that can be retrofitted into your cupboards and fridge. Cameras use computer vision to keep stock and recognise all food that goes into the cupboards and then the scales measure how much is there. All this data is fed into our kitchen virtual voice assistant, called Chef, that lives in our hub device.
“He is then responsible for ordering food, curating meal plans for you and instructing you through the cooking process, taking all the boring parts out of food management and food waste.”
The school of design engineering opened in South Kensington last year with £12 million funding from vacuum cleaner tycoon James Dyson’s foundation. A ceremony yesterday celebrated the creations of its first graduates.
Professor Peter Childs, the school’s director, said he hopes it will “become a manufacturing and design hub, producing gadgets, experiences and services that have the potential to transform our lives”. Another team has invented Re:flex, a super-material made from plastic and elastomer that is designed to be tough and durable, but can be moulded into solid shapes using heat.
It is translucent and has been crafted into a bicycle saddle and a plaster cast — but in mesh form so that the wearer can scratch an itch.
The idea is that components of Re:flex can be separated and recycled after use.
Embla, another stand-out invention, is a smart office complete with a grass floor that “reacts to physiological signals” by tracking workers’ anxiety levels to help create “soothing office environments”, offering personalised heat, moisture and sound.
A mock-up mini-office was built by the students, with devices monitoring skin, heart rate and blood pressure to pick up stress signs.
