Assistive Smart Stove for Safer Kitchens

Kitchen accessibility involves more than simplifying a control panel. A person may need to remember which burner is active, locate ingredients after an interruption, lift cookware, or reach into a low oven. We designed this coursework prototype around three sources of difficulty for older adults and people with cognitive or mobility impairments: memory lapses, unsafe reaching and bending, and the complexity of coordinating several cooking tasks at once.

The concept combined a mobile application with an adjustable stove and oven. The app recorded where ingredients were stored, exposed burner controls, and issued reminders when a burner remained on. The physical prototype raised the cooking surface to a more comfortable height and used a side-loading oven tray so that cookware could be inserted and removed without bending toward a hot, downward-opening door.

We evaluated the interaction through a Wizard-of-Oz study in which four student participants organized ingredients, made tea, responded to an interruption, and prepared a pizza. Two participants used the assistive prototype and two used conventional controls. Observations suggested that reminders helped recover from forgotten burners, the inventory interface shortened searches for misplaced ingredients, and height adjustment reduced bending. Participants also identified concrete problems: cabinet numbering was confusing, controls should not require reaching across a hot surface, and the new interface added learning effort.

The study was deliberately small and did not include the intended older-adult population, so it cannot establish safety or clinical benefit. Its more useful outcome was a set of design priorities for a future prototype: evaluate with representative users, make every safety-critical control understandable without training, preserve direct physical control when an app fails, and treat posture, reach, and memory support as parts of the same cooking workflow. The full report documents the prototype and study in detail.