MUMBAI, India, Aug. 31 -- Intellectual Property India has published a patent application (202641101036 A) filed by Sri Eshwar College Of Engineering on August 20, 2026, for An Artificial Intelligence And Iot Based System And Method For Automated Grocery Inventory Management, Freshness Estimation.
Inventors include Samraj. S; Rithika. P; Sivanandham. S; and P. Ganeshan.
The application for the patent was published on August 28, 2026, under issue no. 35/2026.
Abstract: A system and method for automated grocery inventory management, freshness estimation and recipe recommendation is disclosed. The system comprises a smart storage container housing a camera module, a VOC gas sensor, an ESP32 microcontroller and a Wi-Fi module, which capture images of purchased groceries or shopping receipts and monitor volatile organic compound levels indicative of spoilage. The captured data is transmitted to a cloud server, wherein an artificial intelligence based recognition module, employing TensorFlow, OpenCV and Optical Character Recognition, automatically identifies the grocery items and creates a digital inventory without requiring manual data entry. A freshness estimation module thereupon estimates the remaining shelf life of each identified item using the purchase date, category-wise shelf-life data and sensor readings, and a notification module alerts the user before an item is likely to spoil. A recipe recommendation module suggests recipes based on items nearing expiry, thereby reducing household food wastage. The invention is implemented using Flutter for the mobile application and Firebase for the cloud database and notifications, offering an affordable, automated alternative to manual tracking methods and expensive smart refrigerators. Novelty of the Present Invention: • To the best of the applicant's knowledge, no existing system integrates VOC-based spoilage sensing, AI-driven image/OCR-based grocery recognition and expiry-linked recipe recommendation within a single retrofittable smart storage container; this convergence has not been implemented or disclosed by any prior work. • Unlike conventional smart refrigerators, which are cost- prohibitive and require replacing existing appliances, the present invention is a low-cost, retrofit add-on module, making it the only currently available solution capable of upgrading any ordinary storage unit into an intelligent inventory-management system. • The invention uniquely combines sensor-based spoilage detection with vision-based item identification to compute freshness, a dual-input estimation approach not found in any existing commercial or academic system known to the applicant. • The proposed recipe- recommendation module is directly and automatically triggered by real-time expiry predictions, rather than by static or manually entered inventory data as employed in existing grocery-tracking applications, representing a solution not achieved by prior art. • Being fully automated from item recognition through to recipe suggestion, without requiring any manual data entry at any stage, the system resolves the core limitation of all presently known grocery-tracking solutions and is, therefore, put forth as the only complete and effective solution to the problem of household food wastage arising from undetected spoilage.
Disclaimer: Curated by HT Syndication.
