Sharing our vision

Our aim with CAKIS is to develop a household inventory system that will help average people to run their household more smoothly. We think it’s the right time to introduce such a system, because the use of smartphones, notebooks and internet technologies is today very common and it is continuously spreading.

At the beginning we want to limit the system’s capabilities to the management of  food and other goods in the kitchen. This approach will help us to test general concepts and ideas in system and user interface design.

The main features we plan at the moment are:

• manage the food stock,
• create grocery lists,
• manage a custom recipe book,
• plan a diet for several days.

The system will be distributed. We’ll have a central server storing the data and several types of clients, like smartphones, touchscreens and others. For example it will be possible to record products via a smartphone camera and the products barcode tag. Further we want to integrate internet recipe and barcode databases.

Another focus will be the user interface design and the usability of the whole system, so it can be easily used by less computer affine persons and it is really helpful in daily life.

That’s all for the moment, in the next post we will show a first draft of our system design.

Have you met CAKIS?

We like to introduce CAKIS and ourselves! CAKIS stands for “Computer Aided Kitchen Inventory System”. To get the idea, have you ever experienced one of the following situations?

“I want to bake a cake at the weekend, but do I have enough flour at home?”

or

“Damnit, I forgot the shopping list at home!”

Because we did very often and we had to find a topic for our student research project at the university, we decided to start CAKIS. When it’s done it will hopefully help us to avoid these kind of situations in the future. We will explain in future posts in more detail which features we plan, which technologies we will use, etc.

So who are we?

We are two students at the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University in Mannheim where we study information technology. Our names are Florian Arndt and Christian Kerl.