IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2016 - 6

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Current Affairs from Around the World

GraFooSha
Connecting seniors through food sharing

The idea of a home-cooked meal often
conjures up images of time in the
kitchen with family or friends and or a
specific memory of a favorite recipe to
prepare. These days, sharing a love of
cooking has become even more pervasive, with opportunities offered up by
social media, grocery shopping made
easier thanks to food-delivery services,
and recipe hunting now quickly accomplished with an online search instead of
paging through a cookbook. But despite
the fact that, for many, an appreciation of food-and maybe that favorite
recipe-first came from an older relative, there is much less comfort with
today's digital methods among the
senior population. Graduate students
Miroslav Macik and Anna Kutikova
identified this issue and saw how their
expertise in the areas of communication technology and industrial design
might provide a solution.
The result is GraFooSha, which
stands for "Grandma Food Sharing," a
program and physical device built to
the needs and technical level of seniors
that allows them to connect to a mealsharing network. The idea came from
Kutikova, who had used food-sharing
services in Berlin while living there during the second year of her master's studies. "I fell in love with food sharing and

how it connects different people in the
neighborhood," she says.
Creating a product specifically for
senior citizens also came from Kutikova's personal experience; upon returning
to the Czech Republic, her grandfather
passed away, and she observed the loneliness her grandmother felt now that she
lived alone. "It was a hard time for her,
but she still cooked every day," shares
Kutikova. "But she would pack up the
extra food for me to take back home."
Inspired to find a way to help women
like her grandmother feel less isolated, GraFooSha was born. The project
became the focus of Kutikova's mas-

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2016.2603582
Date of publication: 9 November 2016

IEEE women in engineering magazine

The GraFooSha prototype.

december 2016

ter's thesis, which she was working to
complete after receiving a degree in
industrial design at Czech Technical
University in Prague. Having previously
worked with graduate students in the
Department of Computer Graphics and
Interaction on the design of a haptic
bracelet for the blind, she thought to
reach out once more for guidance on
the technical elements of the food sharing concept.
That was how she came to collaborate with Macik, who just received his
Ph.D. degree in human- computer
interaction (HCI) at the same university. Macik was always interested in
information and computer technologies
and decided to specialize in HCI after
participating in a project to develop an
intelligent household, part of which was
tailored for senior users. In the pursuit
of his Ph.D. degree, he worked on a
variety of projects related to automatic
user interface generation, the subject of
his thesis.
Macik says that the partnership
bet ween his department and that

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2016