The Ambient Kitchen: A Pervasive Sensing Environment for Situated Services Cuong Pham 1,2 , Clare Hooper 2 , Stephen Lindsay 2 , Dan Jackson 2 , John Shearer 2 ,Jurgen Wagner 2 , Cassim Ladha 2 ,Karim Ladha 2 , Thomas Ploetz 2 , Patrick Olivier 2 1 Philips Research 2 Culture Lab, School of Computing Science High Tech Campus 34 Newcastle University 5656 AE Eindhoven, The Netherlands Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, cuong.pham@philips.com England ABSTRACT In this paper we describe the demonstration of the Ambient Kitchen, a pervasive sensing environment designed for improving cooking skills, promoting healthier eating, and helping cognitively impaired people to live more independent in their own homes. The kitchen is instrumented with an embedded sensing infrastructure including RFID, Newcastle University Culture lab’s proprietary wireless accelerometers (WAX), microphone, camera, pressure sensors and tablet computers. Several applications including real-time activity recognition, recipe displays, and real-time food recognition are deployed in our kitchen. Author Keyword Embedded sensors, kitchen utensils, accelerometers. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION This paper introduces the demonstration of a hardware- software infrastructure and applications in the Ambient Kitchen (see Figure 1). The Ambient Kitchen represents a significant improvement from the previous version [1] replacing the web service-base software infrastructure of the previous version with a publish and subscribe messaging service and enriching the environment with more embedded sensing devices such as sauce pans, frying pans, chopping board etc. The design and development of the Ambient Kitchen follows Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing [2]: the sensing technologies and computing devices are hidden from people because they are woven into the fabric of their surroundings. In the Ambient Kitchen, sensors are embedded in the environment and objects such as food containers, utensils and appliances, allowing users to perform cooking activities in a natural way without intrusion from the technologies. Figure 1. The Ambient Kitchen HARDWARE INFRASTRUCTURE Most hardware deployed in the Ambient kitchen is wireless. Particularly, tiny, fingertip sized WAXs. These WAX can easily be embedded into kitchen utensils and appliances. Figures 2 and 3 illustrate kitchen utensils and appliances that are instrumented with WAXs. Figure 2. An off-the-shell peeler re-built to house a WAX (seen behind the peeler with its white casing) Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. DIS 2012, June 11-15, 2012, Newcastle, UK. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1210-3/12/06...$10.00.