Senior Design Team sdmay20-19 • To Online Shop, or To Not Online Shop

The goal of the project is to design a full-stack IoT-based solution that will help to strike a balance between online shopping and offline (in-store) shopping experiences for the consumers. The goal is to develop a project that will:

• Monitor the status of the items in a shelf or cabinet
• Generate a list of items “to buy” and prepare an online order
• Detecting when a particular customer is in a proximity of an actual store (e.g., Target, Walmart, etc.)
• Automatically send notifications that certain items from the “to buy” list that are scheduled for delivery, could actually be obtained in the near-by store (and with discount coupons).

There are two main components for this project. There is the home IoT hardware component that retrieves the data regarding the status of the items from the cabinet or pantry. The data received gets populated into a database with the itemized pantry contents. The other component is the mobile application which retrieves the items that need to be bought from the home device. The algorithms should determine if it is cheaper to buy an item online or in-store. Geolocation should also be used to find the best deal for a product.

Our solution is to use an RFID sensor or barcode scanner along with a microcontroller that can automatically monitor status of the items located in the pantry or cabinet. At midnight a signal will trigger the sensors such that status of the items will be stored using an AWS database. Our mobile application will analyze the data and then generate a list containing the items that need to be bought. We will write algorithms to determine if it’s cheaper to buy items online or in-store. We will also use geolocation to figure out where the best deal for buying the products are.