Final Idea: The Ultimate Shopping Experience

After our meating earlier on today, we decided on our final idea:

We have come to a consensus that we should concatenate two of our most prominent ideas:
The Supermarket recipe advisor and The Motion Sensor Trolley
(Please see the previous posts to why the elderly would find these technologies useful)

By merging these ideas, our technology will offer the ultimate shopping experience for elderly people. The issues our technology will deal with is the difficulties elderly people suffer from when shopping, which are:

• Walking around the supermarket during busy times,
• Forgetting shopping lists (Poor memory)
• They find it difficult to find items for diets that are dictated by illnesses/medical conditions
• Getting lost in the shop
• Having to walk back and forth around the store for multiple items (Inefficient)
• People with poor eyesight are unable to read products and ingredients
• Elderly people get tired when waiting in long queues

Here is our proposed technology to solve the problems we identified:

• Supermarket recipe advisor - a device that will recommend recipes depending on what product is scanned into the device. The device will recommend products depending on:
• Persons health issues
• Recommend certain foods depending on medical conditions. eg Cod liver oil for arthritis
• All of the users information will be on the persons store card. eg. Health information, Shopping habits
• The device will have a budget advisor and offer cheaper products - good for penny saving pensioners.
• This device will be detachable from the trolley
  
• Motion Sensor Trolley - The trolley will have two functions, inside the store and outside.
• Inside the Store -
• The trolley will automatically navigate the person around the store depending on their shopping. This could be done using a Dijkstras algorithm which calculates the shortest route.
• The trolley will navigate the user depending on the type of products the recipe advisor/shopping lists includes.
• For example, If the user wanted to purchase Milk and Bananas, the trolley will guide the user to the Milk first because it is a heavier product. We will implement this because if Bananas were put in the trolley first, they would be damaged by heavier items such as Milk bottles.
• The trolley will have motion sensors to ensure it does not collide with anything in the store. eg. People, Shelves, Other trolleys etc. This could be done using 'Collision Theory'
• There will be a pause/stop button on the trolley. This can be used if the person finds an item that is not on the shopping list and wants to add it to the trolley.
  
• Outside the Store -
• The trolley will be controlled by motion sensors installed in the users shoes.
• We will NOT implement the supermarket sensors in the outside environment because there are an unlimited amount of obstacles.
• The trolley will be designed to deal with the external environment. For example:
• Durable wheels
• Active suspension and hydraulics to deal with pavements
• A trolley cover to protect the shopping from rain
• Intelligent Store Card
• Along with user information, the card will have bank/debit details. It will connect to an online server that deals with the transactions.
• This will eliminate the need for waiting in queues
• The recipe advisor device screen will have a running total of costs
• The trolley will scan the product prices as it is dropped into the trolley
• When an item is taken out, it will be taken off the shopping list
• The final payment will be made once the user walks out of the supermarket, a sensor will automatically take a payment for the shopping.

Supermarkets today are a mess.

"I went into Safebury's, I took a look around and realised that God left this place a long time ago" - Biling Di Caprio

I couldn't be more pleased with this idea