# RFID Based Embedded System for Sustainable Food Management in an IoT Network Paradigm
## 6 Conclusions  
Roughly, developed countries waste as much food (222 million tonnes) as the net food production in sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes) on an annual basis. This fact, being unfair to sub developing countries with low resources for food production, also affects the carbon footprint by emitting 3.3 billion tonnes of CO\({}_{2}\) to the atmosphere. Moreover, the number of people with health issues, such as being overweight and obesity, is increasing worldwide, provoking an increment of medical expenses due to doctor assistance, medication, and surgeries.  
The Smart City paradigm aims to enhance existing services to improve people's lives. IoT provides the tools for cities to become smart. Within the IoT technologies involved in the creation of services in the Smart City paradigm, the radio frequency identification technology allows interaction between sensor devices. Since RFID is capable of identifying labeled-item uniquely and is widely used for inventory procedures.  
This paper presented a food management system, RFID Food Management. RFM is composed of a RFID system capable of reading labeled-items, and a multi-platform application, which processes the RFID information in real time. Two approaches of intelligent recommendation algorithms were implemented and tested: Ingredient-Percentage based algorithm, which recommends, according to the number of ingredients available, and the Ingredient-Weight based algorithm which performs its recommendations based on the importance of the available ingredients within the recipe. Demonstration results comparing these algorithms conclude that a more precise recommendation is obtained when using the Ingredient-Weight based algorithm, because of the importance it gives to the main ingredients of each recipe. The contributions of this work include a multi-platform and centralized application, in which users can obtain recipe recommendations according to the content of the kitchen furniture, in real time, and anywhere. Furthermore, this work enhances the supply chain value in an IoT context by offering to the consumer daily product promotions, benefiting both user and retailer by saving and earning money, respectively. Since RFID is becoming popular to label products in supermarkets for fast checkout processes [23], we believe that the combination of RFID [24] and intelligent recommendation algorithms, will reduce the waste of food worldwide.  
We envision a world where the waste of food is reduced since users with traditional kitchen furniture together with a low-cost RFID system and a simple application can check the content of their kitchen furniture and obtain real-time recipe recommendations based on the ingredient availability. As future work, we plan to enhance our RFM real-time embedded system by:  
* Introducing international ingredients and recipes to adapt to all kind of kitchens;
* Testing our approach in traditional kitchen furniture with UHF RFID system;
* Implementing intelligent functions, as Fuzzy Logic to receive notifications about food consumption, and gamification principals to motivate users for reducing food waste;
* Designing a cloud-based architecture to keep all the information per user and home \"online\". Furthermore, this approach may help with the algorithm running process.  
Conceptualization, R.P.; methodology, R.P., A.P. and C.M.; software, R.P. and A.P.; validation, R.P. and A.P.; formal analysis, R.P., A.P. and C.M.; investigation, A.P.; resources, A.P.; data curation, R.P. and A.P.; writing-original draft preparation, R.P.; writing-review and editing, R.P., A.P., C.M. and J.M.-S.; visualization, R.P. and A.P.; supervision, R.P. and C.M.  
This research received no external funding.  
**Conflicts of Interest:** he authors declare no conflict of interest.