Risk Analysis and Assessment to Enhance Safety in a Smart Kitchen

Cooking activity is accompanied with several risks, mainly for elderly people due to attention and memory impairment. Literature reveals that the kitchen is the second most common place for domestic accidents. We argue that enhancing safety during cooking activities could be achieved via designing a cooking-safe environment based on insightful risk analysis and assessment study. This paper presents our study on risk analysis and assessment during cooking, in order to build a cooking-safe environment. The study is based on theoretical and real-world experimentations. Risk analysis and assessment enabled us to determine the three major risks (i.e., fire, burn and intoxication by gas/smoke) and the pertinent parameters to quantify these risks. The results reveal that the pertinent parameters are: concentrations of volatile organic compounds, alcohol, and carbon monoxide gases in the cooking smoke, utensil temperature, burner temperature, relative humidity, and presence of a utensil on burner. We present in details our study on risk analysis and assessment, including the methodology and the findings.