LABS and AUAS develop a Smart Food Delivery Box
From a user pain point to a design brief
Ordering food online is becoming more and more integrated into the norm of our lives. Moving beyond Friday night sushi and grocery deliveries, this market is growing to transport increasingly more perishable cargo. Foodshed, a new platform developed by info.nl to connect small farmers and niche producers with retailers and the hospitality industry, is enabling the latter.
Through the service design process, a question arose from a user pain-point: what happens when the product arrives damaged or spoiled? The transport and delivery process has reputational and financial consequences when something goes wrong. The team’s UX lead, Sebastian Hølt Bak, proposed a solution to enable monitoring the goods in transit to give insight and add quality control as a potential future service.
Headed by Labs Coordinator Ashlee Valdes, an assignment was formulated to prototype Sebastian’s idea. Internet of Things (IoT) developer Jochem Meuwse was brought in as a principal mentor and the group wrote a design brief for a smart food delivery box, fitted with sensors to measure and track goods from point A to B.
The AUAS student team
Utilising Labs’ partnership with the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences’ (AUAS) Digital Life Center, the brief was submitted as an assignment for a student team in their IoT minor. Through this route, info.nl can explore and prototype a near future research problem without diverting employee time. In February, Labs welcomed a team of six ambitious students with multi-disciplinary studies who were intrigued by the challenge of developing the brief into a functional prototype.
What the students created together with Labs’ mentorship and guidance provided the ability to see, feel and experiment with a new service concept. The ability to bring a research question to life in just five months without diverting time from a team’s tightly managed sprint schedules is a valuable asset. Our partnership with the AUAS is a major contributor, providing us with fresh, enthusiastic minds, flexibility, and short time frame to experiment with new technologies with minimum investment costs.
The SmartBox Specifications
Sensors: temperature, humidity, light, movement
Micro-Controllers: Arduino Uno, MKR WAN 13000
Power: Wireless charging, power bank
Connection: The Things Network (TTN)
Interface: Web page for sensor readings, LEDs on box exterior to indicate charging, temperature status, and if opened or closed
