Smart Plate: Safe and Enjoyable Eating Experience

Imagine that you are sitting down at a family dinner party. You are excited to eat a lot of delicious food. Sadly, by the time everyone is ready to eat, the soup is cold, the vegetables soggy and the ice cream has melted. To make things worse, after you take a bite of the casserole you break out into hives because of a food allergy. This should have been a wonderful night but instead, everyone is feeling discontent. I would invent a “Smart Plate” that would have prevented this whole scenario and instead everyone would have left feeling full and happy. Think about a plate in your own home. A typical plate is designed to basically prevent you from eating off the table. You have to first put food that needs to be heated on your plate. Then, after you have microwaved the food you have to add the cold food like salad to your plate. And then, if you take too long to eat, you have to reheat the food again. Our current plate is nothing more than a table mat.

My Smart Plate will change our whole dining experience. The plate would have sections with different temperature settings so that it could keep your lasagna warm and your salad cold. You could program the compartments to the exact temperature you like. It can also weigh your food and tell you the nutritional value. For example, if you have diabetes, the plate would tell you how much sugar is on your plate so that you can make changes. Your Smart Plate could make you healthier.

One additional useful setting on your Smart Plate is that you could program your plate to alert you with any food allergies. We recently went to a restaurant and even though we checked with the waiter who promised us there were no tree-nuts in the food, when I took one bite, I immediately felt sick with my food allergy. If I were using a Smart Plate, this would have never happened. The Smart Plate will sense the ingredients and alert people of their food allergies. Sometimes humans make mistakes. This technology would be more accurate. This Smart Plate can save lives!

The Smart Plate will be designed to communicate with you. It will encourage you to eat healthy foods. It can also track how quickly and slowly you are eating to make sure you get to your activities on time. It can talk to you, telling you, “Great job- just a few more bites” or “You’re doing awesome- make sure not to forget your carrots.” You can also program the Smart Plate to play your favorite song once you finish eating all your food as a celebration. My song would be "Popular" from Wicked.

The Smart Plate could track and collect your data about how much food you eat, how fast you eat, what foods you like and dislike, your food allergies, and the temperature at which you like your food. This information could be linked to an app on your phone or device using wi-fi or blue-tooth. Also, the Smart Plate could be linked to selected nutrition and cooking websites and can send you recipes to your device. If the plate noticed that you are not eating the broccoli or peas on your plate, it could suggest a recipe that included those foods in a delicious new form so that you eat it next time. Or if you are eating the same food every day, it could suggest new recipes so you can try something different.

To design this plate, we would need a team of engineers that would include material and software engineers. The plate would be nontoxic and safe for people to use. It would tolerate heat without any harmful chemicals. It would be water resistant to wash in the dishwasher. The plate would be sturdy so that it would not break if someone dropped it on the floor.

Keeping personal data safe and private is very important. The plate would have a fingerprint security or a password to keep your information private and secure. You could also have different preferences for what data is saved and used. For example, if you only wanted it to store temperature settings or food allergies and not what you eat or how quickly you eat, etc. you could program those settings only. You can make your data private. We want to make sure that the data does not get used by companies to market food products etc. to you directly without your permission. Data can also be given to a doctor, if you wanted.

I can imagine a world where my Smart Plate is used to save lives, make people healthier, and have the whole eating experience be more enjoyable.