Food Wastage Reduction Management Android App

Visual screens in Canteens providing Real Time information of Food Wastage

Food as we all know is among one of the necessity of life. We cannot survive without it. But food wastage is a major problem in today’s world. Solving this problem is not a responsibility of a few people but the whole mankind has the responsibility to stop food wastage. Textual representations or pictures (such as “LOVE FOOD HATE WASTE”) are a great way to send our message across the audience but they do not retain for much time in their mind. We need something that will remain in their minds even after they had finished their meals. This paper aims at delivering an idea on how this problem can be tackled down with the use of Real time visual analytics.

Internet of Things as we all know has become a buzz word for everyone in this time. Various problems are being solved by it such as the water tank alarm which will automatically switch off the water motor switch when the tank is full or the use of sensor-based lights which turns on when it senses motion and automatically turns off when no one is in the room (or no motion is there). The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept in which surrounding objects are connected through wired and wireless networks without user intervention. In the field of IoT, the objects communicate and exchange information to provide advanced intelligent services for users. Owing to the recent advances in mobile devices equipped with various sensors and communication modules, together with communication network technologies such as Wi-Fi and LTE, the IoT has gained considerable academic interests [1]. Internet of Things has helped our people to live better. Because of this nature of Internet of Things, this paper came into existence. The idea of this paper is to generate awareness among people when they take food to eat in canteens. The targeted audience for this paper are office people eating at office canteens and hostel students eating at hostel mess. For this paper a small people-survey was also conducted asking people of their reactions when they see food getting wasted in canteens. Code Shoppy The mechanism of this project includes putting load sensors under the weighing scale (that collects the wasted food) and taking the figures into a database from where they are dynamically shown to a dashboard (visual screen) that is placed above the weighing scale. As soon as the user puts the wasted food in the bin, the reading in weighing scale changes, that automatically triggers the figures to change in the dashboard. In this way the user can know that he has contributed to the food wastage and this can generate a sense of responsibility or awareness in him which can led him to take less food from then onwards.

Real time visual analytics is used to obtain real time statistics and figures of data to provide to the audience. In this technique, visual screens will be installed in the canteens that are attached to the scales measuring the waste food (that people drop after their meal). This paper concludes with an idea of how statistics would allow people to waste less food as knowing how much we are contributing to the food waste creates a sense of responsibility and awareness in our mind which will ultimately lead us to take less food and waste less food. The paper also helps in deriving smart insights from those statistics that will also help in determining steps to follow before ordering food for that company/hostel. The idea is not only to encourage canteen owners to order less food materials but to create a sense of responsibility among people to save food.