Enabling Calorie-Aware Cooking in a Smart Kitchen

As a daily activity, home cooking is an act of care for family members. Most family cooks are willing to learn healthy cooking. However, learning healthy cooking knowledge and putting the learned knowledge into real cooking practice are often difficult, due to non-trivial nutritional calculation of multiple food ingredients in a cooked meal. This work presents a smart kitchen with UbiComp technology to improve home cooking by providing calorie awareness of food ingredients used in prepared meals during the cooking process. Our kitchen has sensors to track the number of calories in food ingredients, and then provides real-time feedback to users on these values through an awareness display. Our user study suggests that bringing calorie awareness can be an effective means in helping family cooks maintain the healthy level of calories in their prepared meals.