SeVa: A Food Donation App for Smart Living

An important goal in our world today is to eliminate food waste by reutilizing available food sources within local communities: leftover food items in restaurants, stores and food distribution centers that may be approaching expiration; and any perishable items not used in entirety within their desired period. This is highly significant, particularly during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper focuses on creating an interesting mobile application (app) called SeVa that provides a ubiquitous platform wherein users can visualize available food resources in their local area and consequently gain access to food, thereby tackling two major issues, i.e. hunger and food waste. This app is pertinent to the UN SDGs (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals) and fits the general realm of AI for Smart Living in Smart Cities. In addition to entailing IoT (Internet of Things) and ubiquitous computing, this work makes positive impacts on both healthcare and environment by reducing hunger and food waste respectively. We describe our SeVa app development using principles from AI, and especially HCI (Human Computer Interaction), along with its evaluation encompassing user surveys. We also list some open issues with the scope for future work.

I. Introduction

The year 2020 has been hit with challenging times due to the spread of COVID-19, i.e. the novel coronavirus infectious disease. In the midst of this global pandemic, the entire world population has been left to endure drastic consequences. With shortage of quantities in daily essentials such as disinfectant sprays, antiseptic wipes and hand sanitizers, along with lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as facemasks and respirators, another major issue has been food shortage! The immediate shutdown of public schools has impacted school children adversely since many of them depend on the free meals from schools daily. To overcome this problem, there have been food donation centers [1] distributing food as shown in Fig. 1. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought us into a new age operating businesses using a more AI-based virtual environment until daily operations resume as usual. Some businesses have taken this opportunity to enhance their AI-related platforms with new demographics. Several food vendors are learning from this newfound opportunity.