Multi-tasking digital tablet could revolutionise healthy eating

Clear your kitchen benches - a design proposal for a wi fi/bluetooth tablet that does away with recipe books, shopping lists, guesswork, kitchen scales, anxiety about balanced meals and, possibly the telephone, has won the Graduate of the Year Awards in Queensland in Industrial Design.

The Smartscale, is a social media-enabled indispensible kitchen helper and healthy eating coach rolled into a tough, slick digital tablet, and was designed by QUT industrial design graduate Alex King with the aim of helping young Australians tackle home cooking.

"The Smartscale is a stainless steel tablet fitted with digital scales and two lightweight chopping boards that has its own recipe database and can also access any on the net," Ms King said.

"I designed if for young people aged 20 to 29 who tend to eat out a lot and not always make the best food choices because they feel that cooking meals at home isn't convenient. The Smartscale takes care of food portion control, reduces food waste and has plenty of creative recipes to stimulate an appetite to cook at home.

"Users can personalise the Smartscale with their BMI, food allergies, vegetarian or gluten-free preferences as well as their pantry ingredients.

"A user can come home and decide to make dinner. They can gather the ingredients they have on hand, say chicken, chickpeas, and tomatoes and then ask the Smartscale to find recipes based on them.

"Now, if they put the chicken on the scale and find they have twice as much as they need, the scale can recalculate the recipe to maintain a balanced meal according to their BMI or recalculate to make two portions - one for lunch the next day.

"They can then get cooking accessing step-by-step instructions."

Ms King said Smartscale users can share their recipes or see friends' recipes, which encourages use.

"The Smartscale works in conjunction with smartphone applications giving the user access to the Smartscales' recipe database when out shopping so you can pick up what you need on the way home."