Before we know it, everything in our lives seem to be getting smarter. Smart homes will be arriving in Singapore as soon as next year, equipped with features that will let you control almost everything in your house. So we thought it’d be a good idea to take a sneak peek at the kinds of devices we can look forward to in the near future. With Singapore being a nation of foodies, where better to begin than in the kitchen?
Here’s a look at some of the smart devices every type of foodie can expect to enjoy in the coming years.
The Cooking Noob
Singaporeans have a very strange relationship with food. Despite loving to eat, many of us possess limited cooking skills, and rely heavily on recipe books or the Internet for help. If you’re nodding your head in agreement by now — or worse, considering hiring a personal chef just to do the cooking for you — well, here’s the good news.
Pantelligent is a smart frying pan that works with your phone via an app (available on the App Store). The frying pan comes with features such as temperature and timing control, while the app gives you step-by-step instructions — like when to add salt or flip the steak — and lets you know when your food is ready.
The Time-Starved Professional
We’ve all faced this problem: you come home from work starving, but are too tired to cook. You end up grabbing something quick (and totally unhealthy) from the fridge, or calling for fastfood delivery (also equally unhealthy), and almost immediately regret it when you wake up the next day with a bad stomachache.
Well, it seems this has become a big enough problem for the team behind Cinder Sensing Cooker to want to do something about it. They’ve created a device that will cook your food for you depending on what your schedule is like. Simply leave a piece of meat in the cooker, set the temperature through the app and indicate when you want it to be ready, and your food will be cooked just in time, thanks to a temperature control feature that the cooker contains.
The device is perfect for those who have absolutely no time to cook. Since you get to set the temperature based on when you want to have your meal, it doesn’t matter if you’re looking forward to a simple dinner or more complex dishes — you get to eat without getting your hands dirty.
The Health Conscious
A love for food and healthy eating doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive concepts in today’s world. And Singaporeans are beginning to place more emphasis on our health, what with the availability of healthier food options like “less oil, more vegetables”, and the popularity of salad bars.
One such smart device, the Smart Food Scale Prep Pad, will only make healthy eating an even easier endeavour by telling you exactly how much of each ingredient you’ll need and by tracking the amount of nutrients in your food. It’s iPad 3 and iPad mini-compatible, and provides detailed breakdowns of the calories, protein, fat, etc. in your meals. The Prep Pad app also gives you access to a food database of over 200,000 ingredients to search from.
The Drinker
It’s odd, but when it comes to our nutrition intake, we’re more likely to watch what we eat, rather than what we drink. But drinking — or not — can contribute significantly to our overall health as well, which is what Vessyl wants us to be aware of.
This smart cup works by tracking the kinds of liquid we drink each day — if we’re drinking too much coffee or carbonated drinks. The data it gathers will then allow you to analyse your beverage intake. It also checks if you’re meeting your hydration needs, helps you improve on the timing of your fluid intake, and limits the amount of added sugar you consume. The cup has a display showing you the calories you’ve consumed and the amount of caffeine your drink has, and syncs with various fitness trackers.
As someone who doesn’t exactly have healthy drinking habits, Vessyl is definitely something that I’m intrigued by.
The Alternative Foodie
We’ve all heard of the new development in the cooking industry that is 3D food printing. And Foodini aims to take that one step further by bringing the technology right into your kitchen.
The process is simple. All you have to do is connect Foodini to the Internet; a built-in touchscreen on the front of the printer lets you decide on the type of food you would like to make, and choose the recipe to start printing. It will even give you instructions on what food should be put in each capsule. The following infographic says it all:
So now, you can have your (3D printed) cake and eat it, too.