Dreame’s AI concept fridge has a robotic arm that puts your groceries away – and it’s unsettling

Dreame has debuted its latest smart fridge freezer concept, and I think it’s more confusing and unsettling than impressive. The Dreame N1 Refrigerator comes with a robotic arm that unpacks and organises your groceries, and it can even scan your fingerprints so it can recognise you – yes, really.

Dreame has been hosting its NEXT event this week in San Francisco, and to say it launched a lot of products is an understatement. Alongside a new series of A3 robot lawn mowers and its first-ever cordless LED face mask, Dreame has also announced an EV supercar.

But Dreame’s N1 Refrigerator concept might be a step too far – for me at least. The standout feature of the Dreame N1 Refrigerator is its robotic arm. More appliances are being given robot arms lately, particularly robot vacuums for picking up socks, but a fridge with an arm sounds and looks a bit wild.

As displayed at the showcase, the robotic arm of the Dreame N1 Refrigerator unfurled from the top of the fridge before it started to unpack groceries and organise the contents on each shelf. As is the case with other smart fridges, the Dreame N1 Refrigerator uses AI, cameras and sensors to track food’s expiration dates, and generate recipes.

While the robot arm is already a lot to get your head around, the Dreame N1 Refrigerator takes it a step further with its scanning capabilities. It doesn’t just scan your food – of which its AI internal system can identify up to 1,800 ingredients – but also scans your face, fingerprints and wearables to understand who you are.

Using health data from your smartwatch and other wearables, including scales, the Dreame N1 Refrigerator uses the information and the contents of your fridge to recommend recipes to hit your goals. It also uses mmWave sensing which detects when someone is near the fridge. My guess would be with its scanning technology, this sensing helps the Dreame N1 Refrigerator to offer quicker recommendations tailored to each person.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want or need my fridge to know who I am and I don’t like the idea of it scanning my face and fingerprints. According to TechRadar, all these details will be handled privately via a collaboration with Google Cloud but call me old fashioned, I don’t think a fridge needs to know who you are to perform as, well, a fridge.

I’m glad the Dreame N1 Refrigerator is a concept as of right now, it’s a concept I can’t get my head around. I could maybe get on board with the robot arm that takes care of your food shopping, but the fingerprint, face scanning is a big no in my book.

As of writing, pricing and availability for the Dreame N1 Refrigerator hasn’t been released. It was shown at the Dreame NEXT event through animations rather than an actual full-sized model, so it might take some time to develop it.