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Personalized cooking recipe recommendation systems offer the potential to improve dietary choices for unhoused individuals and those transitioning out of homelessness. However, existing systems often neglect the needs of users with minimal cooking experience, providing little guidance during meal preparation. This study proposes the development of an intelligent cooking assistant system designed to offer realtime, step-by-step support throughout the cooking process. The system integrates a Raspberry Pi 5 mini-computer with a Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ (AI HAT+) and Raspberry Pi AI Camera (AI Camera), strategically mounted above the cooking area to continuously monitor culinary activity. At its core, the assistant utilizes a deep learning image classification model built on Ultralytics’ You Only Look Once version 11 (YOLO11) framework, trained on a curated dataset of 1,339 images collected during the preparation of chicken teriyaki and pasta dishes. The model achieved 100% precision and 99% recall of identifying all six cooking states utilized in this work, resulting in an average confidence accuracy of 91% during real-time tests. The system is intended to enable greater culinary independence among individuals with little cooking experience, such as those affected by long-term homelessness. 

The rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has created the possibility of presenting novel recipes, i.e., recipes that do not exactly match any known recipe and this has led to the creation of AI-based recipe recommendation systems. AI-based recipe recommendation has the possibility of accommodating a variety of preferences – including a person’s current health (e.g., diabetes), health goals (e.g., weight loss), taste preferences, cultural or ethical needs (e.g., vegan diet). However, unlike recipes recommended or created by a human dietitian, recipes created by generative AI do not guarantee accuracy, i.e., the generated recipe may not meet the requirements specified by the user. This work quantitatively evaluates how closely recipes generated by OpenAI’s GPT4 large language models, created in response to specific prompts, match known recipes in a collection of human-curated recipes. The prompts also include requests for a health condition, diabetes. The recipes are from the largest online community of home cooks sharing recipes (www.allrecipes.com) and the Mayo Clinic’s collection of diabetes meal plan recipes. Recipes from these sources are assumed to be authoritative and thus are used as ground truth for this evaluation. Quantitative evaluation using NLP techniques (Named Entity Recognition (NER) to extract each ingredient from the recipes and cosine similarity metrics) enable computing the quality of the AI results along a continuum. Our results show that the ingredients list in the AI-generated recipe matches 67-88% with the ingredients in the equivalent recipe in the ground truth database. The corresponding cooking directions match 64-86%. Ingredients in recipes generated by AI for diabetics match those in known recipes in our ground truth datasets at widely varying levels: between 26-83%. The quantitative evaluation is used to inform the development of a web-based personalized recipe recommendation system for diabetics that uses OpenAI’s GPT4 model for recipe generation.