Technology may revolutionize kitchens

Food poisoning may become a thing of the past under a European Union project that would link commercial kitchen appliances to the Internet.

"The idea of remotely monitoring and controlling catering equipment over the Internet isn't new," said Stephen Read, coordinator of the EU's project I'MOK -- Intelligent Monitoring of Kitchens. "But nobody succeeded in doing it. Our plug-and-play software and hardware is a major step forward, with the potential to reduce cases of food poisoning in the European Union by more than 113,000 annually."

Researchers from Belgium, Germany, Italy and England developed a system linking each kitchen appliance with a local area or wide area network control station that's connected to the Internet.

When a problem is detected, the system alerts kitchen managers via an email or text message. Designers say the system can work with anything from a single appliance in a cafe to thousands of machines owned by a large company.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International