Several cooking support systems have been studied to give users instructions based on the recipes stepby-step, using multi-media contents. These systems usually disturb users’ cooking process forcing them to provide information to the system in order to give them beneficial information. In this sense, these systems are considered to be ”system centric”. We propose a system called ”Smart Kitchen...

Human proximity tracking and human situation inference are exploited for comprehending human interaction with objects in kitchen. The importance of this study is to offer interactive and personalized kitchen environment for elderly and disabled people. Also, this smart environment allows for independent living for elderly and disabled people. This study proposes human proximity tracking and inf...

In video, we present the AwareKitchen research project. The setting for this project is a kitchen environment. Kitchens are an important part of everyday life. People spend a significant amount of time in them and do a wide spectrum of activities like preparing and eating meals, cleaning, and many social interactions in the families. The kitchen is in many households an important place for meet...

The operation of quick service restaurants (QSR) is a highly engineered process, with many factors coming into play: physical layout, equipment availability, and worker staffing levels, positioning, and priorities. The Restaurant Modeling Studio (RMS) provides an analysis platform for investigating the impacts of these factors on critical performance metrics, especially speed of service and ser...

At a child care center, 18-month-old Hannah is clinging to her mother and crying as they enter. Her mother pulls Hannah’s hands from her arm, saying, “Don’t be such a crybaby and go play.” In a pediatrician’s waiting room, two-year-old Carlos climbs dangerously high on the furniture. He throws a toy at his mother when she calls his name. His mother laughs nervously and says quietly, “I don’t kn...

In a remarkable work of social history called More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, Ruth Cowan examines the effects of new technologies in the kitchen. Her main conclusion: new technologies like stoves (which were invented in the 18 century and replaced traditional cooking on the open hearth) did not generally make less work for mother....

There are many strategies to assist the user in pervasive environments. In some cases, the user has to achieve a goal according to a plan known by the environment. We address the issue of enabling the environment to be aware of which task of the plan is currently on-going. We present a strategy that makes use of temporal patterns called memory chronicles and that watches events that occur in ob...

Nanoaerosols have been monitored inside a kitchen and in the courtyard of a suburban farmhouse. Total number concentration and number size distribution (5-1000 nm) of general aerosol particles, as measured with a Grimm Aerosol SMPS+C 5.400 instrument outdoors, were mainly influenced by solar radiation and use of farming equipment, while, indoors, they were drastically changed by human activity ...