An automated household inventory management system

Abstract

This project is about a system, named Kitchen Genie, that helps the user in their daily activities when it comes to grocery shopping and inventory management. The main aims of this project include:  Having a system that keeps track of all items in the household without having to go through everything and being able to know the remaining quantity of each item, the location where to find that particular item and their expiry date  Having an automatically generated shopping list where items that are consumed or thrown away because of expiration date are added without user interaction and moreover if the user wants something new, it can be added manually  Having a screen on which the user can get the notifications and a buzzer to get the user‟s attention, before a product expires so it can easily be consumed before it has to be thrown away. From the survey distributed, it was noted that this system will be beneficial in many ways. It could be very useful for those families that both parents work and when they get home have to do all the housework besides going shopping, etc. Therefore Kitchen Genie would save a lot of time. It could also save a lot of money for those people who have a large storage space. This makes it hard to keep track of what items they have and end up throwing them away because they are past their expiry date. This system does all that is mentioned above with the use of a NEX-6810 Ultra-High Frequency Mid-Range Radio Frequency Identification Reader and Higgs3 stickers. It is concluded that such system should be considered as an investment rather than a cost. This is because although it is quite expensive to implement, the long term benefits that it provides will outdo the initial cost.