FuzEmotion as a backward kansei engineering tool

Abstract

Kansei engineering, also known as kansei ergonomics or emotional engineering, aims at analysing and incorporating customer's feeling and demands into product function and product design. Founded in the late 1970's, kansei is now considered as a key consumer-oriented technology for new product development. This paper described a system called FuzEmotion for the purpose of assessing the kansei aspects of a product by considering design attributes of a product. Fuzzy logic is used to represent kansei words and process fuzzy input. The system has been successfully implemented to ascertain gender inclination of a mobile phone. Principal parameters of a mobile phone are considered, i. e., length, width, thickness, and mass. The system can inform gender inclination of a mobile phone with accuracy up to 76%. This is based on a set of 92 mobile phone samples from the five major mobile phone manufacturers. © 2012 Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.