The smart pizza packing: an application of object memories

Abstract

Smart objects are a promising way to achieve digital support for our daily life. However, despite the constantly decreasing manufacturing costs of electronic components, complex embedded systems are still too expensive in relation to the price of most everyday objects. In this paper we demonstrate, how complex applications can still be realized with cheap and weakly instrumented smart objects by establishing so-called object memories and consequently exploiting the capabilities present in the static environment to use and update this memory. We illustrate this idea with a concrete application scenario, in which we accompany a frozen pizza through selected stages of its lifecycle. We report on requirements regarding technology and memory content, and describe our memory framework implementation as well as two hardware demonstrators from the smart home domain.