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Credit: Future / Dreame
Dreame demonstrated a concept fridge at its showcase in San Francisco
It uses AI to scan and sort your food, with a robotic arm to organize items
It also scans your smartwatch and fingerprints to recognize you, and give you personalized nutrition advice
Maybe it’s because I’m in the process of buying a home and looking to buy my own appliances for the first time, but Dreame’s high-tech refrigerator with AI-powered nutrition tracking isn’t just one of the best things I’ve seen so far at the Dreame Next product showcase — it’s also the most unsettling.
I’m here in San Francisco to get a glimpse at all of the smart home tech the brand is developing, and although Dreame has showed this futuristic fridge before, I’m particularly interested in the way it uses your health data.
The fridge itself sounds pretty impressive, with a robotic arm that will properly sort your food into appropriate chambers, cameras that will track your food’s freshness, and an AI system to help you find recipes to use items before they decay. There’s also a water dispenser that can carbonate your water to serve it sparkling.
However, I’m more intrigued by the way it determines who’s opening it by scanning your face, fingerprints, or smart wearables. Once it knows who you are, it can use health data from your scales, smart watch, or smart ring — plus the info on what’s in your fridge — to find recipes that’ll help you hit your health targets.
The Dreame Fridge can scan your biometrics | Credit: Future / Hamish Hector
This is all apparently handled privately through a collaboration with Google Cloud, allowing the fridge to identify over 10,000 ingredients with an over 97% accuracy, and not compromising your personal information when offering eating tips.
It’s all fascinating, but I’m not sure I want a judgemental fridge sitting in my kitchen. Nor do I love the idea of it having my biometric information, or my health data, even if it could arguably help my eating habits.
Dreame doesn’t have a price or release date for this fridge, but even as just a concept, it does seem like the way smart home tech will evolve as brands like Dreame and Samsung promote AI-fuelled interconnectedness between our various gadgets.
Hopefully the final form of this integration won’t feel invasive — otherwise I might want to stick with as dumb a fridge as I can possibly find.