What can I do with this system?
In order to illustrate the potential of our toolkit, we implemented and provide two simple prototypical applications. Besides that, there are a few example videos available that illustrate the barcode recognition on mobile phones. (Download/Videos)
Literature Information
The first prototype represents a simple literature information system, providing information about scanned books, such as their current price or a list of related items (see figure 1).
Figure 1: Example application: The above screenshots show the literature information – sample application that has been implemented using our recognition and resolution system.
Allergy Assistant
The second prototypical application implements a tool for checking ingredients in nutrition products that could trigger an allergic reaction. Using a retail goods database such as GS1 we could gain access to detailed allergen information of individual products, based on their EAN-13 code. Together with an individual shopper’s allergy profile, the application is able to warn the user of potential allergic reactions to an item with a single click.
Figure 2: Example application: The above screenshots show the allergy assistant – sample application that has been implemented using our recognition and resolution system.
Figure 3: A newer version of the allergy assistant - running on an android device and our next generation bar code recognition technology (2010).
Given our toolkit, the implementation effort for these two demos was quite low. Changes on the provided J2ME client were limited to renaming issues and took about 5 minutes. Implementing the allergy test application required the implementation of a “service connector” (see General System Structure), providing access to a (commercial) product database, and the implementation of the service component that would generate the result according to a previously defined user profile.