Development of a Cooking Support System Aimed at University Students Living Alone

It is common for people to start cooking for themselves when they go away to university. It is important to acquire knowledge of foods and to experience cooking while young. With this in mind, we have developed “Cookma” a cooking support system using microblog. Cookma supports step-by-step improvement of cooking abillity and increase of recipe repositories by a recipe recommendation function that considers cooking difficulty. Cookma both motivates students to cook, and supports continuation by a dish photo sharing function via microblog and a gamification function. Evaluation experiment results showed the following three points: (1) It is possible for Cookma to motivate users to cook habitually by a recipe recommendations that considers cooking difficulty. (2) Sharing dish photos on a microblog can motivate users to cook habitually. (3) Game-like elements of replies between a user and a Cookma bot can motivate users to cook habitually.