Food preparation has been a constant chore since the first human beings picked up cutting and mashing stones. In return, this effort to make food edible, preserve it, and transform its character has sustained an ever-increasing population. Many techniques, including grinding, sifting, drying, salting, sealing, fermenting, and applying heat, are extremely ancient. Few fundamentally new techniques have been introduced in the past two centuries, among them microwaving.

Preparing a meal is a basic activity needed for survival and it’s a skill that everyone should be able to learn. It is a complex task which involves multiple sensory organs to indicate the state of preparedness of any particular dish. This is true when preparing Indian meals like bread, complex gravies, fried snacks and desserts. Unless you order takeout for three meals a day, cooking is a necessary chore in daily life. When it comes to blind cooking, there is danger in the high heat and flames involved, and it is easy to mess up a recipe by pouring in the wrong ingredient, or even too much of the right one.

While preparing a meal there are many steps involved which include ingredients procurement by navigating to the grocer, arranging the ingredients in the kitchen, applying various cooking methods such as cutting, stirring, kneading, and frying to prepare the meal and finally cleaning the vessels that were used in cooking. Preparing a meal independently can directly determine the quality of life of an individual. Research has indicated that Visually Impaired Persons (VIPs) who prepare meals independently have a lower level of nutritional value in their food.

Loss of sight leads to a lowered richness of information available to VIPs to make many decisions while cooking. This forces VIPs to use their other sensory organs such as tactile, auditory and olfactory. A healthy human has a set of senses. Sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are defined as the five traditionally-recognized senses. If one of the five traditionally recognized senses is impaired, human behavior will also be affected, and some of the necessary skills may not be completed fluently. For visually-impaired individuals, the factor of impaired sight affects this collaboration of the senses. All of the healthy senses are needed to compensate for the impaired sight in order to normalize each individual’s daily activities.

Objective of the Project:
The aim of this project is to elaborate on the challenges of cooking frying foods and design an assistive device for VIP’s that tackles problems while keeping Indian cooking methods, practices and resources in mind.

Case Study Download:
• Designing a Cooking Aid for the Blind......