Design and Implementation of a Professional Kitchen IoT Hub

Recent advances in the development of sensor technology and in the improvement of their connectivity have allowed a widespread application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in different areas (e.g. connected health, smart homes, smart cities, etc.). Many approaches in the literature have focused on the application of IoT in home kitchens for the purposes of automation and monitoring of processes. However, to our best knowledge there are no approaches focused on professional kitchens, in which there are many processes taking place concurrently and in which kitchen staff are under pressure to deliver food products on time. This paper presents an initial design and implementation of an IoT solution in the form of a virtual data pipeline that channels information obtained from events captured by sensors distributed in a professional kitchen to end user applications. The proposed solution is in the form of a four-node IoT Hub, based on clusters of single board computers, in this case Raspberry Pi, and Apache Kafka technologies, that receives and collects data from temperature sensors in the kitchen, notifying when food is ready and if food is not safe for human consumption. Initial results are promising and it is expected to have a more developed version to be tested in real professional kitchens in the next iteration of the proposed approach.