SeVa: A Food Donation App for Smart Living

Varghese, C.; Pathak, D.; Varde, A. S.

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.