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FuzEmotion as a backward kansei engineering tool

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Xun Xu, Hsiang-Hung Hsiao & William Wei-Lin Wang

Authors
  1. Xun Xu
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  2. Hsiang-Hung Hsiao
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  3. William Wei-Lin Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xun Xu.

Additional information

Xun Xu is a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He received the Ph. D. degree from the University of Manchester (then UMIST), UK in 1996. He heads the Manufacturing Systems Laboratory and is the director of Intelligent & Interoperable Manufacturing Systems (IIMS) research unit in the University of Auckland. He is a fellow of ASME. He has published over 150 research monographs and serves as a member of the editorial board for 7 international journals.

His research interests include design, CAD/CAPP/CAM, STEP, and STEP-NC.

Hsiang-Hung Hsiao received his B. Eng. (Hons) and M.Eng. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the School of Engineering, University of Auckland in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

His research interests include product design, manufacturing information systems, and product services.

William Wei-Lin Wang received his Bachelor Honors degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 2010. He is currently a member of ASME and JSKE.

His research interests include product design and professional training.

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Xu, X., Hsiao, HH. & Wang, W.WL. FuzEmotion as a backward kansei engineering tool. Int. J. Autom. Comput. 9, 16–23 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-012-0611-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-012-0611-y

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