CookTab: Smart cutting board for creating recipewith real-time feedback
Ayaka Sato
University of Tokyoayakasato@acm.org
ABSTRACT

Although many cooking recipes have been shared in theworld, there are still many homemade meals that are neverwritten down as recipes. The difficulty to create recipes ofsuch homemade meals lies on (1) experienced cookers might
not have accurate information of ingredients (e.g., weight andtiming) since they often decide the amount of ingredients justby intuition, (2) they often have trouble to record suchaccurate information while cooking. To solve these problems,
we propose a smart cutting board, CookTab, which allows auser to easily record his/her cooking activities (e.g., thenames and quantities of ingredients) while provides real-time
feedback to motivate him/her.

Koji Tsukada
Japan Science and Technology Agency
tsuka@acm.org
In this paper, we focus on a recording system while“cutting”: one of the most basic activities of cooking. We
propose a smart cutting board, CookTab, which allows auser to easily record his/her cooking activities, including
the names and the amount of ingredients. CookTab also
provides real-time feedback to motivate and support
him/her.

Author Keywords Cutting board, recipe, cooking, kitchen.
ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m [InformationInterfaces and Presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Miscellaneous.
General Terms Design, Human Factors
INTRODUCTION

Although vast amounts of cooking recipes have been sharedin the world, there are still many different recipes that requiredifferent amount and timing of ingredient even when they arecalled with the same name. Moreover, many homemademeals, which are modified to suit the family’s tastes, are notwritten down as recipes. Meanwhile, as recipe-sharing
services (e.g., COOKPAD1, allrecipes.com2) have become
popular recently, common people became interested inwriting down their own recipes.
The written recipe mainly consists of ingredient andcooking order. We focus on the ingredients because
experienced cookers might not know accurate informationof ingredients such as weight and timing since they often
decide the amount of ingredients just by intuition.
Moreover, cookers often have trouble to record accurate
amount of ingredients while cooking. The goal of ourresearch is to create a “Smart Recipe” from daily cooking
activities
usingsmart
kitchendeviceswhilemotivating/supporting cookers (Figure 1).
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
UbiComp’12, September 5-8, 2012, Pittsburgh, USA.
ACM 978-1-4503-1224-0/12/09.

1

http://cookpad.com/

2

http://allrecipes.com/

Figure 1. CookTab Framework
RELATED WORK

Many research efforts have revolved around cooking in theubiquitous computing field. There are several systems that
focus on recording cooking. For example, Siio et al. [3]proposed a smart kitchen to record cooking withvideo/audio by cameras and mikes attached on the kitchen.
Chi et al. [1] set weight sensors under complete kitchen (akitchen counter, a stove and a cabinet) to record themovement of ingredients to support a healthy lifestyle.
Kranz et al. [2] focused on a cutting board which equips
four load cells and an acceleration sensor. They also
attached the microphones and cameras near the cuttingboard to record ingredients.
While these systems mainly focused on just recording
cooking activities, our system provides real-time feedback
while recording these activities to motivate/support users.

COOKTAB

CookTab is a smart cutting board that can record theamount and timing of ingredients used in cooking whileproviding real-time feedback (Figure 2). CookTab equips
four weight sensors and a tablet PC under a clear cuttingboard. The tablet PC contains a capacitive touch panel
display and an acceleration sensor. We selected athin/robust cutting board to cover devices to allow users toaccess the touch panel easily. The device also equips acamera above the cutting board to capture videos/images
while cooking.

(4) Tap the “STOP” button to finish recording.
(5) Repeat (1) to (4) for each ingredient.

Figure 3. Basic usage of the CookTab. (A) Cutting a carrot on
the CookTab. (B) Selecting an ingredient before cutting. (C)Visual effects (e.g., ripple) are shown on the screen according tothe strength and interval of cutting
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

Figure 2. The CookTab prototype. The system can record
weight of ingredients and video of cooking while providing
visual feedback.
UsageIn this section, we describe the system usage.
(1) A user selects an ingredient used in the cooking throughthe touch panel as shown in Figure 3-B. The user first
selects a category (e.g., vegetable or meat), and then selects
the ingredient. When the current ingredient is not found in
the list, the user easily creates a new item by tapping anicon and taking a picture using the camera.
(2) The user places the ingredient on CookTab and taps the“REC” button to record the weight and the video using thecamera.
(3) CookTab provides visual/auditory feedback based on
the activity performed on the cutting board to the user asshown in Figure 3-C. We prepared two kinds of feedback
based on different activities: (i) the parameters of his/her
cutting activities (e.g., strength and interval) detected by theweight sensor and the acceleration sensor and (ii) thesimilarity to recorded activities. The former feedback ismainly designed for expert or hobby cookers, while thelater feedback is for serious amateur who want to learn theexpert cutting technique.

We propose a smart cutting board, CookTab, which allows auser to easily record his/her cooking activities whileprovides real-time feedback.
Our next challenge is to record other activities in cooking
with proper feedback. We plan to develop a recording
system for seasonings. Seasonings would require muchaccurate measurement methods because the amount of
seasoning might change the taste drastically even with littledifference. In the future, we integrate these e-kitchen tools
to create smart recipes including accurate weight, timing,and video of cooking while motivating users for creation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project is partly supported by JST PRESTO program.
REFERENCES

1. Chi, P., Chen, J., Chu, H., Chen, B. Enabling NutritionAware Cooking in a Smart Kitchen. CHI '07 extended
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2. Kranz, M., Schmidt, A., Maldonado, A., Rusu, R.B.,
Beetz, M., Hornler, B., Rigoll, G. Context-aware kitchenutilities. Proceedings of the 1st International
Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction,
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3. Siio, I., Mima, N., Frank, I., Ono, T., Weintraub, H.
Making recipes in the kitchen of the future. CHI ’04:
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