Sharp puts a touchscreen in a chopping board

Sharp's Chop-Syc is a high-tech chopping board with an embedded touchscreen tablet and built-in scale.

We often use an iPad in the kitchen. As well as using cooking-specific apps, you can look up recipes on websites, drop the tablet into a book stand and have a pretty decent stand-in cookbook that can also double as a measurement converter and cooking encyclopedia for definitions and techniques.

Sharp wants to go one better. It is currently looking at bringing the Chop-Syc to market, a high-tech chopping board prototype with an embedded touchscreen LCD tablet and built-in scale for weighing ingredients. Designed by Siobhán Andrews as the winning entry in Sharp's #GetItDownOnPaper competition to win a two-month internship, the idea is to make healthy cooking and portion control much easier.

We can see the benefits. With a toughened-glass front designed to withstand not just the impact of your knives, but the assorted juices from your ingredients, you wouldn't have to worry as much about touching the screen with wet fingers, and the scale can help multiply, or divide, ingredients based on how many people you're cooking for and weigh everything out accordingly.

Another handy feature is a circle that shows how much spaghetti you will need to cook by standing the pasta upright to fit inside.

Chop-Syc is Wi-Fi enabled to allow you to connect to the internet and will sit on a charging mat so that your kitchen-bench space isn't cluttered by a charging cable. One end is even tapered so that you can easily scrape ingredients into your cooking vessels. And when you're just, say, chopping up a bit of fruit for a snack, its digital features can be disabled, displaying a wood-grain wallpaper as your chopping surface.

Alas, we have no idea when — or even if, although it's looking likely — Sharp plans to bring the Chop-Syc to market.