2 min readBeing avid coffee drinkers, as well as dedicated researchers and developers, our team decided to combine the best of both worlds: a system for personal care and fully automated coffee preparation. Black as night, sweet as sin: meet SoftServe Barista, a smart coffee machine.
As you’ve probably noticed, wearables and smart agents (personal assistants and recommender systems) have become the norm, ultimately becoming a part of our everyday life. Imagine smart ecosystems stuffed with IoT, sensor networks, M2M/D2D communication, with a pinch of artificial intelligence. And, what do you get? Well, naturally every coffee drinkers wildest dream and now a workaday reality, the ability to expedite your coffee preparation from the comfort of your desk.
Having wide experience in working with embedded devices, BLE and biosignals measurement and processing, we decided to use these high-level skills and build a smart recommender to optimize and fully automate what we all need in life – a coffee preparation process. Our coffee machine remote control uses wearable devices to provide recommendations concerning which coffee to drink based on heart rate monitoring. Here are five main techs of the demo:
- Uses biosensors to read heart rate.
- Constantly measures heart rate on Apple Watch (optimized battery consumption).
- Allows M2M communication (Apple Watch/iPhone <-> coffee machine).
- Detects and identifies users via iBeacon.
- Uses ultrasonic proximity sensors to detect cup and brew coffee.
Read on for more details about our recommendation engine.
Apple Watch
Even though the rules are quite simple and can be run on any wearable and embedded gadgets (such as a fitness bracelet, smart watch, etc.), to ensure usability, a chosen wearable device requires an inbuilt measuring unit (for HR), an interactive display, and wireless com munication.
Be it too mainstream or not, Apple Watch seems to be a perfect match. A short test-drive showed the Apple Watch has no problems with continuous heart rate measurement, and even provides more battery life (approximately 10 hours).
Conclusion
The main goal of our project is to enable remote control of the coffee machine from wearable devices and provide appropriate coffee choices based on heart rate monitoring. Right now, we have proved the concept for one user and one machine, but we will keep on studying the ways to scale it up to multiple users and multiple machines. If you measure out your life with coffee spoons, here’s a chance to make this process easier.