Have you heard about the international conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction? While I was browsing through ACM DL, I discovered the proceedings of the first conference which was run last year in cooperation with ACM SIGGRAPH and I got very excited. The proceedings have five chapters including "Connectedness" and "Learning through physical interaction" where quite a lot of interesting papers were presented. I will just highlight one short paper here: "context-aware kitchen utilities". This paper talks about how every day kitchen utensils such as a knife or a chopping board could be made a little bit more 'intelligent' to determine the types of food handled during the preparation of meals. Although the idea sounds so simple, I am sure there are plenty of cases where such developments could be useful to cognitive impaired and aging people.

Context-aware kitchen utilities

We report on approaches for context-awareness in a kitchen environment. Two devices, an augmented cutting board and a sensor-enriched knife, enable the environment to determine the type of food handled during the preparation of meals.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1227013
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction, P. 213 - 214, 2007, ISBN:978-1-59593-619-6