"Honey, could you get me another toilet paper roll?" "Sorry babe, we're all out, I'll run to the store." Meanwhile someone is left sitting in the bathroom for the next twenty minutes.
"Mom, where is my Honey Grams cereal?" "Its right on top of the refrigerator." "No it's not." "Sorry honey, we must be all out." And a child goes without breakfast.
So many items lay around our houses - whether they be ingredients (bread, flour, sugar, honey), toiletries (toilet paper, soap, shampoo, conditioner), or electrical (light bulbs) they all must be kept in just the right amount of supply. This requires repeated trips to the grocery store, and oftentimes painful discoveries that we are out of this or that (e.g. when we are really sick and suddenly remember we ran out of all our pain and cold medications).
With wireless networking now common it seems to me that it would be relatively simple to implement an automatic home inventory mechanism. This would consist of three portions: (a) wireless bar code readers, (b) server (home computer), and (c) remote centralized server. Let's look at each in detail:
Wireless Barcode Reader:
A reader would be a very small scanner unit, not bigger than one's thumb that would reside on walls or cabinets. When an item was stocked it would be scanned, and when an item would be removed (as empty) it would be scanned. A plus or minus button on the reader would allow one to inform the scanner whether one was adding or removing inventory.
Server:
Within the home on a normal computer would be a "server" application. This would receive all additions and subtractions from the readers. It would keep track of the current inventory and warn when items were low. It would allow searching and establishing of threshholds.
Centralized Server:
This server would be the centralized server for the entire system for all customers. It would centrally accumulate databases of barcode items and would on-request receive barcode requests that the server was not familiar with and send back the correct identification. In cases where no definition was available, the server would beep letting the user know they needed to enter a description for the item.
This whole system could be used in conjunction with automated shopping tools, using an API. It would allow users to determine which products should be automatically re-ordered when they reached a certain threshold level.
What do ya think?
Update 6/25/07:
This device is currently in the beta testing stage by a company called IKan. Thanks for the tip from CrunchGear. I've signed up the beta and am eagerly awaiting to hear my fate.