A unique cooking app for people with brain dysfunctions Connected Kitchen

The Connected Kitchen app contains very simple recipes with detailed step-by-step cooking instructions.

There, we described in detail:

• All the ingredients necessary
• All the necessary tools
• Cooking sequence
• Tips on when to alter the temperature

  NHS employees download all recipes on their own from the server.  

One of the requirements for the application was to ensure its operation offline. Internet connection is only required at the very first start. Then the application downloads all recipes and the user can work offline.

One of the key requirements of the NHS was to provide voice control for the app. Our experts integrated this feature for the main features of the application:  

• Find me a <food> recipe
• Start recipe
• Next step
• Previous step
• Repeat step
• Stop cooking

The implementation of this functionality was not straightforward. The difficulty was that each user could pronounce words with a different accent and sometimes unintelligibly. Thus the application could run a wrong command or fail to perform at all. Our mobile team selected the maximum set of words with similar sound combinations for each command and made sure that the commands in the app also responded to these words.

We faced the problem where people with brain dysfunctions could start cooking, then leave the kitchen and forget about what they were doing.

Our developers synchronized the Connected Kitchen functionality with a bracelet via Bluetooth. The difficulty of this task was that not all devices work equally well via Bluetooth. Therefore in order to ensure the uninterrupted operation of the application we needed to test a fairly large number of devices.

Our experts created a bracelet settings screen in Connected Kitchen. When starting the application, the user needs to configure the kitchen area.  If the user moves outside the kitchen zone the bracelet produces sounds and vibrates as an alert.

The bracelet also acts as a reminder in the kitchen when the user has to move to the next stage of cooking - the bracelet starts to give signals even if the user is located in the kitchen.

Mobile developers have created another way to prevent issues if the user forgets about cooking. If the user does not make the transition to the next step within a specific time the app sends notification to a server which subsequently informs a designated contact person with a warning about the situation.

One of the requests of the NHS was the capability to voice all recipes. To implement this requirement, our experts used Text-to-Speech technology by Google.