UMI: YOUR PERSONALIZED FOOD FRESHNESS COMPANION

Project timeline: 7 weeks
Project team: Jiwon Woo, Tomoyo Onishi, Connie Wang

Think of Umi as an augmented nose, that can detect the level of freshness of your food with more accuracy and reliability than your own senses. Our team was particularly appalled by the largely unscientific and unregulated space of food expiration labeling in the United States, resulting in large amounts of food waste. The only product that is currently (2023) regulated for expiration labeling is baby formula. Food expiration labeling for any other food product, fresh or shelf-stable, is voluntary and oftentimes confusing due to the lack of standardization in language and criteria. You may have seen “best by”, “expiration”, “best if used by”, “fresh until” labeling on your food, but what does this all mean? Oftentimes these dates are overly conservative in order to avoid any sort of risk or liability to the producer of food companies, therefore, perfectly good-to-eat food is tossed out, and that value is lost.

If we can’t affect change at a policy level to require stricter and more accurate food freshness labeling, what can we design to give power back to consumers so that they have more control over what they eat, when, and what they toss out?

The three of us spent 7 weeks researching the food waste space, narrowing down the scope of work for a proof-of-concept, and building out a first workable prototype that can accurately detect food freshness via off-gases released by fruits and vegetables as they “rot.”

We designed Umi with the elderly population in particular because this subset of users have impaired senses due to age and can also have an outsized negative impact on health if eating unfresh or spoiled food. Scoping down our target users to the elderly population that still prepare their own food and want to live with more independence felt like a great entry point to testing out some of our ideas and sensor technology. Here’s how we approached this problem:

Arduino readout of gas sensor testing

Spoiled oat milk carbon dioxide gas sensor LED response and light pattern coding

Early concept of what Umi’s paired digital experience would look like.