Ambient Kitchen - Home

The Ambient Kitchen is a lab-based project through which we are exploring the use of pervasive computing for assisted living. The kitchen provides a platform for explaining and exploring the application of pervasive computing technology in a domestic setting. Building on previous technical developments at Newcastle University in which we have used pervasive computing to support older people, elements of the physical environment and appliances are instrumented, both with sensors and displays, which allows both wireless collection of activity data and the display of helpful information.

The Ambient Kitchen embeds sensors in the kitchen environment (e.g. floor, cupboards, kettles and food containers) that allow the kitchen to be aware of how food and utensils are being used. Tags integrated in food items and appliances, together with sensors integrated into the bench and cupboards, allow the location, and changes in location, of objects to be monitored; and a pressure sensitive floor allows people in the kitchen to be tracked. Projectors integrated into the workbenches calmly display contextual information, such as appropriate recipes and the nutritional value for food that is on the kitchen work surface. Our design philosophy was to completely integrate the sensing and display devices such that it retains the appearance of conventional kitchen - we're not interested in surrounding people with unfamiliar gadgets.

Although the Ambient Kitchen allows us to explore how we might design pervasive computing environments, we are particularly interested in supporting older people, especially people with dementia. Our current plan is to use the Ambient Kitchen to develop task tracking and prompting technologies that might be used to solve some of the problems that Andrew Monk and Joe Wherton (University of York) identified in their studies of people with dementia. Their work is also a source for design constraints such as how to minimise the effects of unfamiliarity with kitchen appliances. Integrated cameras, coupled to the embedded sensors, allow the automatic recording of activity in the kitchen as video.

For a description of the construction of the Ambient Kitchen, the technology, and what it does, see the Navigation menu on this page. The Ambient Kitchen is a collaboration between: CELS, the Institute of Ageing and Health (Newcastle University), the School of Computing Science (Newcastle University), the Informatics Research Institute (Newcastle University) and the Centre for Usable Home Technology at the University of York.

Contact: Patrick Olivier

This site is hosted at Culture Lab - Newcastle