In this presentation we will investigate how Kansei Engineering and User Experience Design come together to solve real problems in a large healthcare organization; transcending the boundaries between physical and digital solutions and contexts. We will investigate examples from industry and various methodology for driving collaboration and culture change. We will also discuss the value and, perhaps more importantly, the responsibilities that come with participating in the engineering of sticky and infectious experiences. Organizational structures and other enabling details will also be explored.

Humans pursue well-being in their lives. Well-being encompasses positive emotions, life satisfaction, well-functioning, meaning of life, and self-growth (Andrews & Withey, 2012; Diener, 2000; Seligman, 2002). In ancient times, sharing is an intimate behavior which solidates strong community and lead to an ideal life (Price, 1975) which refers to well-being in the present. Sharing economy sheds light on a novel business model which people can develop well-being while sharing among strangers. However, prior research shows users participate sharing economy because of self-interest rather than social interaction or sustainability as we expected (Botsman & Rogers, 2010; Hamari, Sjoklint, & Ukkonen, 2016). Sustainable well-being is not only for ourselves, but for our communities, and our planet (Calvo & Peters, 2014). Thus, we investigate how the well-being components can be built in sharing economy and foster users to pursue it in the long run. This study reviews and synthesizes prior studies to (1) elucidate the well-being components in the P2P sharing economy, (2) model the sharing ecosystem with well-being components in a global view, and (3) propose the technological solutions of a P2P sharing platform to facilitate well-being. Furthermore, we provide examples of practice to illustrate the proposed model. We believe this study not only motivates platformers to take users’ well-being into account but promotes the sharing ecosystem to function sustainably and prosperously.

This study investigated and analyzed the relationship between leisure activities and subjective wellbeing among middle-aged people in China. Specifically, we conducted a web-based questionnaire survey of men living in Shanghai, one of the cities directly under the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, which did not show any significant change in the frequency of participation in leisure activities before and during COVID-19. Based on the survey results, we used SEM(Structural Equation Modeling) to analyze the relationship between the three categories of leisure activities and subjective wellbeing. The results showed that the disciplines classified as hobbies and sports sectors had a significant positive impact on positive emotions, one of the elements of subjective wellbeing.

The rapid development of e-commerce and impact of the pandemic may affect consumers' healthy behavior in purchasing OTC medicines. This study aimed to examine the relationship between Japanese consumers’ current behaviors of purchasing OTC medicines and literacy through exploring the digital experience of purchasing based on tablets. An online questionnaire was conducted in the Kanto region of Japan, which included questions on purchasing behaviors and medication literacy, and the Japanese version of the eHealth Literacy Scale. Of the participants who had experience in purchasing OTC medicines, 89.47% preferred to buy them at pharmacies or stores, whereas 9.47% tended to purchase them online ( χ2(2) = 271.50, p < .01); 64.24% accepted choosing medicines through a digital screen ( χ2(3) = 102.36, p < .01) and 85.26% obtained information through smartphones while purchasing OTC medicines at pharmacies or stores. Young consumers aged 20-29 years used smartphones significantly more frequently than those aged 30-49 years (p <. 01). There was a positive correlation between eHealth literacy and smartphone use (r = .24, p < .01). The results suggest that Japanese consumers prefer to visit a pharmacy or drug store to purchase OTC medicines. They also prefer to search for information about OTC medicines on-site with a digital device, such as a smartphone, rather than buying OTC medicines from online stores. The digital experience of a tablet-based purchasing system would be useful and acceptable for young consumers and those with high eHealth literacy.

Previous studies have indicated that many patients with eye diseases are not adherent to eyedrops due to the difficulty in administration. The purpose of using eyedrop compliance aids is to help patients who have difficulties in administering eyedrops. However, this method has not been well recognized and accepted.

This study aimed to upgrade eyedrop compliance aids so that the adherence of eyedrop users could be improved. Among the research methods employed in this study, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) helped in proposing the best function sequence of the device, and a questionnaire based on the Kano model helped understand the degree of satisfaction with the existing products, as well as discover the appealing factors of their functions and examine their functional relationships. Finally, the results of the two methods were discussed and compared, and the results were used to identify the basic appealing factors influencing consumer satisfaction as well as provide the element attributes and significant features to be weighed in the design of eyedrops. This study suggested that in the design of eyedrops, both the physical and psychological needs of users should be taken into consideration, and reference indexes for aids design that may effectively improve user adherence to eyedrops should be proposed.

Falls are one of the major health risks that affect the quality of life among elderly peoples, but the elderly do not like to wear anti-falling clothing in their daily life as the anti-falling clothing are inconvenient, uncomfortable and not beautiful for the elderly to wear. The elderly clothing and anti-falling function have not been perfectly integrated. To prevent the elderly from being injured by falling and meet their pursuit of clothing, there is a need to integrate anti-falling function into elderly clothing with high satisfaction. This study aims to identify the integration strategies can meet the dressing effect that the elderly pursues in different scenarios using Kansei Engineering Type I. The design strategies for the elderly clothing with anti-falling function will be determined. A framework of integrating anti-falling function for elderly clothing with high satisfaction will be constructed. The results of this study can support the improvement of elderly clothing performance.

A method for estimating health conditions is required to monitor daily health conditions. Various types of data have been used in healthcare studies; however, imaging data are superior because they allow quick and remote measurements. Thermal face images can be measured safely and economically using infrared thermography. Many physiological and psychological states have been evaluated based on the data from these images. A previous study, using short-term experiments, confirmed that an anomaly detection model constructed using a variational autoencoder enables the detection of anomalous states of thermal face images. A long-term experiment is essential to estimate long-term fluctuating human states, such as health conditions. The purpose of this study is to construct a facial skin temperature-based anomaly detection model for human health conditions. The authors obtained thermal face images with health condition questionnaires for approximately a year. Based on the questionnaire responses, the thermal images in good and poor health conditions were labeled “normal state” and “anomaly state,” respectively. The facial skin temperature-based anomaly detection model for health conditions was constructed using a variational autoencoder with only thermal face images in the normal state. The AUC, which represents anomaly detection performance, was 0.70. In addition, an increasing trend of the performance of the model by learning a wider area of skin temperature was confirmed.

Many assumptions were made about people's dissatisfaction with their daily lives, such as debt burden, social problems, unstable economic conditions, health problems, cost of living, lack of job opportunities, lack of educational support, and so on. The positive or negative emotional experience is distinctive between individuals or groups of people who share similar life experiences. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the emotional responses of a specific population to daily obstacles that may be related to the mentioned scenarios. The Lokman's Emotion and Importance Quadrant (LEIQ)^TM, which was built on axes of emotion vs. importance, was used in this study to discover the importance of the identified indicators to the people’s happiness. The model is based on the idea that accurate strategies to improve people's quality of life can be devised by classifying indicators that contribute to people's emotions and understanding their importance to the people who interact with the stimuli. The findings of this study will eventually enable the identification of indicators that significantly influence people's positive or negative emotional states, which can then be used by stakeholders to devise effective strategies for future improvements.

Kansei models were used to study the connotative meaning of music. In multimedia and mixed reality, automatically generated melodies are increasingly being used. It is important to consider whether and what feelings are communicated by this music. Evaluation of computer-generated melodies is not a trivial task. Considered the difficulty of defining useful quantitative metrics of the quality of a generated musical piece, researchers often resort to human evaluation. In these evaluations, often the judges are required to evaluate a set of generated pieces along with some benchmark pieces. The latter are often composed by humans. While this kind of evaluation is relatively common, it is known that care should be taken when designing the experiment, as humans can be influenced by a variety of factors. In this paper, we examine the impact of the presence of harmony in audio files that judges must evaluate, to see whether having an accompaniment can change the evaluation of generated melodies. To do so, we generate melodies with two different algorithms and harmonize them with an automatic tool that we designed for this experiment, and ask more than sixty participants to evaluate the melodies. By using statistical analyses, we show harmonization does impact the evaluation process, by emphasizing the differences among judgements.

In small musical groups, performers can seem to coordinate their movements almost effortlessly in remarkable exhibits of joint action and entrainment. To achieve a common musical goal, co-performers interact and communicate using non-verbal means such as upper-body movements, and particularly head motion. Studying these phenomena in naturalistic contexts can be challenging since most techniques make use of motion capture technologies that can be intrusive and costly. To investigate an alternative method, we analyze video recordings of a professional instrumental ensemble by extracting trajectory information using pose estimation algorithms. We examine KANSEI perspectives such as the analysis of non-verbal expression conveyed by bodily movements and gestures, and test for causal relationships and directed influence between performers using the Granger Causality method. We compute weighted probabilities representing the likelihood that each performer Granger Causes co-performers’ movements. Effects of different aspects of musical textures were examined and results indicated stronger directionality for homophonic textures (clear melodic leader) than polyphonic (ambiguous leadership).

The sustainable business must develop the fundamental technology for strategies that ensure people are interested in the information and contents for long periods of time. To contributes to this goal, this study was that a more realistic sense of boredom was evoked by the action of repeatedly listening to music in situations of repetitive consumption, based on the Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) model defined psychologically boredom as two separate components of meaning and attention. Our experiment was the repetitively listening to the same music which had the highest or lowest level of preference, which was conducted over seven days respectively. Through electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements, decreased attention was measured by the increased alpha wave and the decreased beta wave. In addition, decreased meaning was measured by the increased gamma wave. In conclusion, measuring boredom must include factors of the temporal changes and the conditions of preference, particularly for EEG.

With the widespread availability of Voice Assistants in smart devices, the usage of Voice User Interfaces has highly increased in the recent years. Although the anthropomorphized Voice Assistants present in these systems can aid users in many tasks, it also activates harmful gender bias and stereotypes. Since the usage of Gender Ambiguous voice agents in these interfaces is considered as solution for mitigating these gender effects, this paper analyzed different studies in the field of Voice User Interface design, while proposing a theoretical framework to design gender ambiguous voice agents, considering the type of recording, method of sound manipulation, method of evaluation for gender identification and contextual characteristics.

The purpose of this study is to visualize affective information that cannot be conveyed by symbolic notation alone, to enhance the musical experience of the hearing impaired. To represent the rhythm of music effectively and uniquely, we focused on Chironomie, which represents the structure of rhythm with emotional impression. In general, Chironomie is drawn by a curve corresponding to the score, which is determined by whether a short segment of the score represents one of two classes, Arsis or Thesis. First, we utilized the machine learning technique to classify Arsis and Thesis from the score as input. We conducted experiments to confirm the accuracy of the classification, and the usefulness of the estimated Chironomie in conveying the rhythm of music. In the latter experiment, four types of stimuli combining visual and sound information were used to confirm the effects of Chironome: score only, Chironomie only, score and Chironomie, and score and sound. Results showed that Chironomie has certain usefulness in conveying the rhythmic structure of a piece of music. This paper mainly focuses on evaluation experiments and discusses experimental and analytical methods under these experimental conditions.

Non-Linguistic Utterances (NLUs), produced for popular media, computers, robots, and public spaces, can quickly and wordlessly convey the emotional characteristics of a message. They have been studied in terms of their ability to convey affect in Robot communication. The objective of this research is to develop a model that correctly infers the emotional Valence and Arousal of an NLU. On a Likert scale, 17 subjects evaluated the relative Valence and Arousal of 560 sounds collected from popular movies, TV shows, and video games, including NLUs and other character utterances. Three audio feature sets were used to extract features including spectral energy, spectral spread, zero-crossing rate (ZCR), Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), and audio chroma, as well as Pitch, Jitter, Formant, Shimmer, Loudness, and Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio, among others. After feature reduction by Factor Analysis, the best-performing models inferred average Valence with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.107 and Arousal with MAE of 0.097 on audio samples removed from the training stages. This means that the model was able to predict the Valence and Arousal of a given NLU to less than the difference between successive rating points on the 7-point Likert scale (0.14). This inference system is applicable to the development of novel NLUs to augment robot-human communication or to the design of sounds for other systems, machines, and settings.

There is an increasing demand for “natural” products by consumers, businesses, scientists and product developers. Trends suggest that the term natural may be colloquially understood to be a plant-based material or ingredient. This study investigates whether this trend could apply to polymers by declaring the derivation of the polymer as a plant or as petroleum. Because polymer materials do provide environmentally positive attributes for products in relation to other materials, such as lightweighting, durability, and lower fabrication energy requirements, it may be helpful to understand the influence of a polymer’s derivation on the perception of a polymer product’s sustainability. The goal of this study is to assess peoples’ relative perceptions of the sustainabilities of polymer drinking cups when the base materials from which the polymers were derived are exposed. A set of six injection-molded drinking cups was given to research subjects to analyze. Each cup is made of a different polymer. The polymers have derivations including petroleum, corn, sugar and trees. Participants evaluated the cups on six qualitative design strategies for sustainability, including natural-ness. This paper compares the perceived sustainable attributes of the cups, and which attributes were most strongly influenced by revealing the derivation of the polymers.

It is said that the relationship between “novelty” and hedonic response is expressed as an inverse U-shape. The latest studies about perception emphasize “novelty” as a factor of emotion and quantify “novelty” by assessing the difference in amount of information using Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. In this study, we proposed a novelty index of closed surfaces using KL divergence focusing on their curvatures. To calculate novelty index, we firstly calculated Gaussian curvature of each vertex in the shape. Then, we defined occurrence probability distribution which represents probability that a vertex has a certain curvature. The KL divergence expresses the difference between the occurrence probability distributions of the standard shape and the target shape. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed index, we conducted the cognitive experiment using the shape samples of an automobile generated by particle swarm optimization method. The coefficient of determination between the proposed index and sensory evaluation values of “difference” were very high which support the applicability of the index. Furthermore, the consideration of location information increased the correlation with sensory evaluation. This suggests the possibility to evaluate an industrial design requirement quantitatively and contributes to develop the automatic shape generation in product design.

In recent years, deep learning has attracted much attention and various techniques have been proposed. GAN (Generative adversarial networks) is one such method. When images are used as the training set, this technique learns to generate new images that are indistinguishable from the images of the training set. Using this method, new face images of non-existent people can be generated from the face images of real people, or input images can be converted into the images with the style of a particular painter such as Monet.

In this study, using this capability of GAN, a method of generating a new product design from the images of customer's favorite products is proposed. The product images that customers evaluated as preferable in the kansei evaluation are used as the training set of GAN. Since the GAN generates images that are indistinguishable from the images in the training set, the new images generated are more likely to be preferred by customers.

In the case study, the proposed method was applied to the chair design. Subjects evaluated their preferences for images of various types of chairs collected from the Internet, and new chair images were generated based on the chare images that subjects evaluated as preferable. The generated chair images were first evaluated in terms of image quality, i.e., whether they looked like chairs or not, and how innovative they were compared to existing chairs, and then subjects evaluated their preferences.

The negative attitudes towards robots scale (NARS) was applied widely in the robot-human interaction research field. However, robots' various occupations and roles have not been discussed when studying the negative attitudes towards robots. In this research, we aim to explore whether the occupation of robots could influence people's negative attitudes towards robots. The service robot and security robot, two types of robots that may be widely used, were used in the NARS-related study for the first time. We conducted the online questionnaire research, including three separate parts: negative attitudes towards robots, negative attitudes towards service robots, and negative attitudes towards security robots. The results of the online survey collected from 114 participants (54 females and 60 males) highlighted differences among the scores of people's negative attitudes towards service robots and the negative attitudes towards robots or security robots. People show the lowest negative attitudes towards service robots. There are no significant differences between the negative attitudes towards robots and security robots. This research supported the hypothesis people show different levels of negative attitudes towards different types of robots in the occupational division. These results provide a helpful indication for the study and design of robots with various occupations in the robot industry.

This paper proposes a method of conveying a driver’s intention to yield by blinking automotive lighting. Generally, headlight flashing indicates a driver’s intention to yield to another driver or pedestrians in Japan. However, this signaling method can have several meanings, including warning other drivers of road dangers such as crashed cars, or informing other drivers of the presence of a pedestrian. There is a possibility of a misunderstanding, increasing the risk of accidents. Therefore, we have investigated an effective method for facilitating communication in traffic. This study focuses on nonverbal communication in which blinking lights convey the driver’s intentions to others. In this study, visibility is not considered. Nine blinking patterns that changed the light colors, waveform, and blinking cycle were presented to fifteen healthy participants, and visual impressions were evaluated to identify the most suitable blinking patterns. These nine patterns indicate a driver’s intention to yield to pedestrians and other drivers. The results indicated that a blue-green blinking pattern in which luminance changes with a triangular wave pattern with a one-second cycle was best conveyed the intention to yield.

Some assistive devices (ADs) aim to ease elders performing daily activities by changing postural and strength requirements. Elders usually have cognitive lacks too, making AD usability perception an important issue. Usability perceptions arise from the affordances conveyed by the AD: design features should act as signifiers transmitting opportunities of how to use the AD. This study assesses the perception of jar openers usability. Eye-tracking (ET) data from 56 subjects were used. Rendered images of 6 ADs were shown, in 2 versions: with and without rubber on the grip area. Each slide showed the 6 ADs, each AD image being an area of interest (AoI) to be tracked. The participants ranked the ADs in the next usability affordances: comfort, effort level, easiness to grip, easiness to use, lid slippery and robustness. For each affordance, they were eye-tracked while deciding the best AD, and afterwards they ranked the other ADs. The ranks were transformed into scores, and their correlation with ET parameters (decision time and number of fixations on each AoI) were studied, along with the effect of the rubber on the scores. Heat maps were also analyzed to identify the signifiers of the ADs that attract attention on usability. The results showed the potentiality of ET to study the perception of ADs usability affordances, and that the addition of rubber on the grip area of the jar openers or the material and shape of the lid area have an effect on their understanding and use.