Democratic Main Dish Decision Process Considering Food Inventory
Kota Onodera (AY 2021)
Many people have difficulty and worry about planning a menu for dinner every day. There are three factors that contribute to the difficulty: (1) "the needs of the people around the table," which causes discrepancies in the dishes that the people around the table want to eat; (2) "using up the stock of ingredients in the refrigerator," which makes it troublesome to plan a menu using ingredients that need to be used up; and (3) "lack of cooking tools and skills of the cooks when planning and preparing the menu," which causes "lack of dishes that the cooks are able to prepare. (3) Lack of cooking tools and skills of the cook when thinking of a menu and preparing a dish. Assuming that the "What do you want to eat tonight?" problem consists of the above three subproblems, we constructed and evaluated a system to solve these problems.
The proposed system consists of four subsystems. The first is an ingredient inventory control system. The system searches the recipe database using the name of the ingredient as a query. The system then recommends the recipe to the cook and selects it as a suitable recipe. The second is a voting system. The second is a voting system, which presents the selected recipes as compatible recipes to the cooks and diners in turn. The third is a tabulation system. The third is a tabulation system that receives the voting results, tabulates them, and ranks the adapted recipes. The fourth is a result notification system that notifies everyone of the ranked recipes.
After the system was developed, an evaluation experiment was conducted with 10 families, for a total of 33 people. The experiment consisted of the participants using the system and answering a questionnaire about the experiment. The results of the experiment showed that the voting system was effective in satisfying "the needs of people around the dinner table". However, the "inventory of ingredients in the refrigerator" could not be solved due to the lack of input information on the inventory of ingredients and the timing of the presentation of information on the entire recipe. As for "dishes that can be prepared by the cook", we could not get a clear answer because the number of negative and positive responses was almost equal and the selection of compatible recipes was done with a different intention than the one intended in this experiment.
Future directions include exploring the extent to which the range of considerations for the cook in selecting adapted recipes can be expanded, and finding the optimal timing for presenting the full recipe. In this study, we used a chatbot to search for ingredients in the refrigerator, but it may be possible to automatically identify ingredients in the refrigerator more easily and accurately using the Internet of Things (IoT) and image recognition processing.
(Translated by DeepL)