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Sci Tech
Supermarket shopping sans strain
The award winning entry, `Autoshop' if installed can cut down queues at cash registers. -- Pic by Shaju John
ANYONE WHO visits a supermarket to make purchases must often have had the following experiences: Not knowing what to buy, having forgotten the list given by the spouse back home. Unable to locate a particular product and meandering through a maze of aisles and shelves heavily loaded with various items. Waiting with mounting frustration at the check out counter as the long queue in front inches forward excruciatingly slowly as each item in the shopping cart of each customer is barcode scanned and the prices totalled up and the bill prepared. Well, all these travails may be a thing of the past, thanks to a software program that takes the strain out of supermarket shopping.
Four Singapore undergraduates, all of Indian origin, have beaten almost 3000 other teams in the region to win Microsoft's prestigious Asia Pacific student .NET competition held in Beijing. The Nanyang Technological University Computer engineering Students who created the software program, `Autoshop'— Kapil Vaidyanathan, Kunal Talwar, Anumeha Bisaria and Harishankar Vijayarajan — will now go on to pit their skills against the world's best in a .NET in Barcelona, Spain in June.
The winning idea is a touch screen computer mounted on the handle-bars of a shopping cart. When a customer drops an item into the cart, a built-in barcode reader automatically registers its price. When the shopper is done, the reader totals up the items and sends a message to the central server (to which it is connected by wireless LAN) with the bill. The bill then is transferred to the cashier and all the customer does at the cash counter is pay the bill. It saves time. The cashier no longer has to key in the price of each and every item into the computer manually. The gadget also helps shoppers locate items in a store and alerts them to special promotions. The computer allows the customers to do things like: create a virtual shopping list — sorting different brands of say, biscuits by price or number of calories, find out their total bill — as the shopper scans the item over a barcode reader on the trolley, the item is ticked off the virtual list and spending is added up as he goes along. If after scanning, he decides against purchasing a particular item, there is a delete option on the touch screen which he can use and the billing is adjusted accordingly. Locate where different items are with the help of maps which indicate where the customer is and how to get to the item in question. If a wife wants to convey to her husband the list of items to be bought on his next visit to the supermarket, all she has to do is to access the website of the supermarket and using her husband's shopping ID leave the list on the supermarket's central server. When the husband logs on with his ID onto that supermarket's shopping cart, the list is automatically displayed on the touch screen.
There are also benefits for the supermarkets which use the program. The device can help cut down queues at cash registers. A sensitive weight sensor is fitted to each hi-tech trolley and this can tell if the weight of the items in the basket corresponds with what has been scanned. The system monitors purchasing habits of customers and flashes advertisements of products commensurate with customer's purchasing habits on the touch screen.
The programming for the application was done on Visual Studio.net which is a developing environment to make programming/software development easier for programmers. SQL server was the database. The server used was a Windows 2000 Advanced Server.
K.S. Rajgopal
in Chennai
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