1. Scenario in the future

The fully automation without manual operation for cooking in kitchen is promising in the coming, that’s due to the needs of living convenience and the fast development of IOT and e-commerce. Figure 1 is the scenario of smart kitchen appliances controlled by a smart phone. By this time most of data can be stored in cloud servers and operated by terminals, and there are a lot of Apps to be developed by cloud-terminal technology for supplying various applications in most of living area for getting better living quality. Such as the smart kitchen incorporated with IOT and ecommerce, it is the key point for an intelligence house or smart house development. The new wave of kitchen gadgets is featuring by sensor applied, remote control, big data storage, and full automation. For example the air conditioner, security system, and lamps, they can be automatic controlled via sensor feedback, wireless connection, and data analysis for achieving continence. However these appliances don’t be a best application of IOT in a house, it still needs to develop and find as you know.

2. What are home appliances?

As you know home appliances are an electrical/mechanical machine which accomplishes some household functions, such as cooling/heating, cooking or cleaning. Generally, home appliances can be classified into three types as following:

• Major appliances or white goods,

• Small appliances,

• Consumer electronics or brown goods

1. Major appliances: it also known as white goods, comprise major household appliances and may include: air conditioners, dishwashers, clothes dryers, drying cabinets, freezers, refrigerators, kitchen stoves, water heaters, washing machines, trash compactors, microwave ovens and induction cookers. White goods were typically painted or enameled white and even without painted, many of them still are.

2. Small appliances: they are typically small household electrical machines, easily carried and installed. Some are classified with white goods, and relate to heating and cooling such as: fans and window mounted air conditioners, and heaters such as space heaters, ceramic heaters, gas heaters, kerosene heaters, and fan heaters. Yet another category is used in the kitchen, including: juicers, electric mixers, meat grinders, coffee grinders, deep fryers, herb grinders, food processors, electric kettles, waffle irons, coffee makers, blenders and dough blenders, rice cookers, toasters and exhaust hoods.

3. Entertainment and information appliances: they are such as: home electronics, TV sets, CD, VCRs and DVD players, camcorders, still cameras, clocks, alarm clocks, video game consoles, HiFi and home cinema, telephones and answering machines are classified as "brown goods".

This is a trend to networking home appliances together, and combining their controls and key functions. For instance, energy distribution could be managed more evenly so that when a washing machine is on, an oven can go into a delayed start mode, or vice versa. Or, a washing machine and clothes dryer could share information about load characteristics (gentle/normal, light/full), and synchronize their finish times so the wet laundry does not have to wait before being put in the dryer. Additionally, some manufacturers of home appliances are quickly beginning to place hardware that enables internet connectivity in home appliances to allow for remote control, automation, communication with other home appliances, and more functionality. Internet-connected home appliances were especially prevalent during recent Consumer Electronic Show events [5]. Here we collect and present some of commercial examples to show smart appliances with remote control in houses. These examples are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Smart appliances for a smart house application

3. Introduction to a newly smart appliance in kitchens

To a busy modern people, it is an expectation for solving their living matters (e.g. cooking, washing, cleaning etc.) via IT (Information Technology, IT) assistant; Most of us know that an automatic technology for industries production and manufacture is a key factor to upgrade their production efficiency and cost saving. Even now this kind of revolution is still going up by combined a novel IT and DT (Data Technology, DT) into their manufacture process. By now the IDT (information and data technology, IDT) development it still is the engine for pushing GDP growth up in the world. By contrast this, the automation in kitchen appliances; it is still trailing than industry application. Therefor a lot of inventors or creators who like to improve this situation, by IDTs they were used to develop smart devices for improving the convenience of living matters. For instance, they created an intelligence refrigerator, a smart TV, an air conditioner, or a smart fire prevention system etc… As we know there are no significantly critical or key products to be innovated in kitchen appliances till now. That is an interest question, why there are no novel smart appliances to be accepted by most of us in a smart appliance market, our question is what the gap between creators and consumers are? We hope to find the requirements that we need to do daily, and this requirement through IOT applied it can save time and get more conveniences on food preparation. Fortunately we found it; the most essential appliance in a kitchen is the rice cooker, especially for the oriental. As we know the rice is the staple for most of Asian, rice cooking is the most thing for living on rice. The preparation of rice cooking is tedious and cumbersome, so how to reduce the steps of rice cooking to one step is an interesting question. According to our observation, the wash of rice is the critical point that due to it needs to consume a lot of water when washing of rice, and after then it needs to drain out the washed water. So if we use a washing-free rice to replace the general rice that we can overcome the problems caused by the rice washing, for examples that we don’t need a lot of water to wash the rice, a drain out we also don’t need it anymore, and the cooking process it can easy be automatic by integrating the both of rice and water working flow. Here the core production for rice cooking combined with water dispenser to be presented by a new invention which be named as “two in one water dispenser with intelligent rice cooking (2x1 WDIRC)” and three in one water dispenser with intelligent rice cooking and grinding (3x1 WDIRC + Grinding). The detail of the both productions we will describe them in the following section.

4. What are the requirements to a smart kitchen appliance?

In order to support the use of smart house, these appliances have to be integrated in a network system and, possibly, to via remotely control their usage. For example, smart plugs or smart meters provide some of basic features but fail to integrate tightly with the functions and sensors of the appliance. Therefore to a smart plug or a meter, that just an application on one way control or monitor, no feedback control to be applied in this system. So how to integrate the sensor and actuator in a device is the problem; based on this reason, the basic hardware units of smart appliances are presented in Table 2. Embedded sensors are the feature of this system, by this table we illustrate and summarize the most important concepts of hardware to a smart appliance. In addition we present the costs of the different technologies with an example and their general characteristics. Costs based on single unit are listed for comparison only. Moreover if we want to design a smart appliance in houses, we also need to consider the network type of wireless. Because their costs of manufacture and maintenance are different which depends on the use of network type, as we know, there are a lot of network types to be used in a smart house system such as Zigbee, Wifi, bluetooth, Infrared, 4G-LTE, LTE-M1, LTE-NB and 5G etc… Which one is suitable for us and we need to decide, usually the communication chip or module will depend on the protocol of wireless that we used, and it will directly relate to the cost and competitiveness of product. Normally, for a movable device frequently, LTE protocol is good for this, if not, due to the cost of communication chip or module the Wi-Fi or blue tooth are better than LTE. Another way is to use a “system on chip (SoC)” that includes MCU and communication chip together, it is easy to use, but the cost seems not cheap, so the design of product needs to consider this factor of cost.

One major idea of the smart house concept is to provide a two-way communication between the entities of the smart system. Therefore, many different smart communication techniques exist which are suitable for smart appliances. However the requirements of communication among these smart appliances they need to be fulfilled on the conditions of reliability, security, privacy and availability. Table 3 shows the comparison adapted by different wireless technologies in smart appliances communication. Here includes the maximum data ratio, the maximum transmission range, the used frequency bands and the prospective smart application for every technology.

In general, four types of smart appliance to be classified as following:

• • Domestic Appliances

  • Entertainment Appliances

  • Basic Infrastructure Appliances

  • Smart Infrastructure Appliances

In Figure 1, the four families are illustrated with their common devices. The domestic appliances contain for example a refrigerator, washing machine, stove and etc. Some of the appliances of this family have high power demand. In contrast, the families of entertainment and infrastructure consume less power and accordingly influence the total power consumption to a lesser extent. Finally, the type of infrastructure devices it belong to the permanent family; they can be generally classified into basic and smart. Basic devices are for example the lightning, the switching or the fire alarm. Smart infrastructure devices are a new introduced appliance family, which are responsible the one hand for measure power consumption and communicate with the smart grid and on the other hand to make decisions how to optimize the current power consumption to reduce power requirements and also environmental pollution by unnecessary power wasting.

The introduction of hardware concepts mentioned above can be applied to the four appliance families dependent on their tasks and characteristics. We defined the following facilities to find out which task and characteristic to every special appliance family should have, it is shown in Table 4.

• • Computation (Comp): Does the task of the appliance need high computation abilities?

  • Measurement (MS): What characteristics should be measured and how with which precision?

  • Data Storage (ST): Should the appliance provide a storage ability?

  • Switching (SW): Should it be possible to switch the appliance on/off remotely? Is zero watt a requirement?

  • Visualization (VIS): Should the device be able to visualize predefined and computed data (e.g. power consumption, on/off time, etc.)?

Communication (Comm): What are the communication requirements of the appliance? Do you like to use Zigbee, wifi or LTE?

Normally, a house appliance has elements to run their functions, for example, we need a memory to storage data from peripheral, a micro-processor to compute the data, a display to show the result and operation, a network chip to communicate with other devices or systems and a sensor or actuator. According to different demand, that will need different elements to operate. To our product WDIRC, the basic frame is the same as a house appliance, but we still need actuators to drive pumps, valves, and heaters. These I/O elements can be controlled by a remote controller, through this kind of operation; users can easy achieve a comfortable life. It worth to note, since 2017, 3GRP issued the protocol NB-IOT for IOT device use, this is a frequency band in 4G LTE designed for IOT communication, and the chip of NB-IOT has listed in markets, many vendors had produced these chips, we can use these chip for saving cost and time when we designed the product WDIRC.

5. Introduction to a newly smart appliance in kitchens

To a busy modern people, it is an expectation for solving their living matters (e.g. cooking, washing, cleaning etc.) via IT (Information Technology, IT) assistant; Most of us know that an automatic technology for industries production and manufacture is a key factor to upgrade their production efficiency and cost saving. Even now this kind of revolution is still going up by combined a novel IT and DT (Data Technology, DT) into their manufacture process. By now the IDT (information and data technology, IDT) development it still is the engine for pushing GDP growth up in the world. By contrast this, the automation in kitchen appliances; it is still trailing than industry application. Therefor a lot of inventors or creators who like to improve this situation, by IDTs they were used to develop smart devices for improving the convenience of living matters. For instance, they created an intelligence refrigerator, a smart TV, an air conditioner, or a smart fire prevention system etc… As we know there are no significantly critical or key products to be innovated in kitchen appliances till now. That is an interest question, why there are no novel smart appliances to be accepted by most of us in a smart appliance market, our question is what the gap between creators and consumers are? We hope to find the requirements that we need to do daily, and this requirement through IOT applied it can save time and get more conveniences on food preparation. Fortunately we found it; the most essential appliance in a kitchen is the rice cooker, especially for the oriental. As we know the rice is the staple for most of Asian, rice cooking is the most thing for living on rice. The preparation of rice cooking is tedious and cumbersome, so how to reduce the steps of rice cooking to one step is an interesting question. According to our observation, the wash of rice is the critical point that due to it needs to consume a lot of water when washing of rice, and after then it needs to drain out the washed water. So if we use a washing-free rice to replace the general rice that we can overcome the problems caused by the rice washing, for examples that we don’t need a lot of water to wash the rice, a drain out we also don’t need it anymore, and the cooking process it can easy be automatic by integrating the both of rice and water working flow. Here the core production for rice cooking combined with water dispenser to be presented by a new invention which be named as “two in one water dispenser with intelligent rice cooking (2x1 WDIRC)” and three in one water dispenser with intelligent rice cooking and grinding (3x1 WDIRC + Grinding). The detail of the both productions we will describe them in the following section.