information about their contents, nutrition and health, but this has not
translated into demand.^7 Tasks such as managing shopping lists and looking up
recipes simply don’t feel as if they require a new, fridge-based screen. The
idea of the fridge that automatically orders more shopping when goods run out
is fraught with potential for irritating errors. If you have to make the fridge
sync with your calendar or heating thermostat to see when you’re on holiday
in order to stop your regular milk order, maybe it’s just simpler to buy your
own milk after all.
Connected sensors enable many kinds of data in the world to be captured,
quantified and made visible. Fitness tracking and energy monitoring (see e.g.
figure 4.13) are obvious consumer examples of this. But beware you’re not
just counting things. Data should be used to provide genuine insights that users
can act on.
(^7) Matthias Rothensee, User acceptance of the intelligent fridge: empirical results from a
simulation, IOT'08 Proceedings of the 1st international conference on The internet of
things, 123- 139