Smart Microwave - The idea

Microwaves are fundamentally stupid. The user basically has two knobs: time and intensity. The user also need to know their food and their microwave well enough to know how best to heat the food. The modern microwave is no smarter than a light switch with a dimmer.

The solution is to give the microwave some brains, or in lieu of that, some sensors. Smart Microwave would have four types of sensors: distance sensor, thermal, visible (camera), and a chemical sensor. The main goal of the Smart Microwave would be to get food to the desired temperature as measured with the thermal sensor.  The distance sensor would be used to make a 3d map of the food. The food’s color and temperature would be overlaid on that 3d map. The color and shape would allow the microwave to make a guess at what it’s trying to heat. Color change in food is sometimes unexpected and can mean something is about to burn. In these cases the microwave would know it almost went too far or used too high of an intensity. The chemical sensor would primarily be used to sense when something is starting to burn. If it were cheap and easy, more flexible sensors could be used to ‘smell’ the food to get a better idea of how to heat it.

There would also be a weight sensor on the spinning plate to weigh the item. The plate could also move in more than just the smooth motion of normal microwaves. By using some jerky motion, it would be possible to determine if the item being heating is a liquid or generally gelatinous. This could come in handy if the microwave is thawing a liquid. It would be an unpleasant surprise to find a bit of ice left in a bowl of mostly warm soup.

As creative as people are, they aren’t that creative about what they put into the microwave. The majority of the uses would fall into 5 to 20 categories. If would be easy enough to build models for these use cases ahead of time. All the user should need to do is say how hot they want their food: thawed, warm, hot, or very hot. If the microwave underheated or overheated, it would be easy for the user to give feedback and the microwave would learn (and upload the lesson for other microwaves to learn too).