Automatic content level detection for Smart Containers

By Saurabh Rawat, Rosarium Pila: STMicroelectronics India Introduction: Monitoring food consumption has numerous benefits not only in the prevention of food wastages but also in studying variousfood and dietary habits of people. In a country like India having a population of 1.25 billion where majority of the diet consists of pulses and rice there is no perfect way to determine how much of the food is being consumed daily/weekly or annually, other than manually keeping the track of this information in household. In Every household there are at least 10-15 such containers (made of plastic or steel) containing various pulses and food items .Using STMicroelectronics components (MCU ,Sensors and NFC-Near Field Communication) such plain containers can be converted to smart containers which can help in tracking the amount of food consumed.
Fig 1 .Pulses Containers The purpose of this article is to explain the design and operation of such prototype developed by STMicroelectronics. A system consist of Microcontroller(MCU), Sensors and connectivity module (NFC/Bluetooth) can be used for food content level detection in a container and this information can be transferred to a remote PC or Handheld device manually(or automatically). Food content can be soli...