Kansei Robotics: Bridging Human Beings and Electronic Gadgets through Kansei Engineering

Abstract

Human beings are often strongly impressed by a grand view, relaxed by a favorite music, upset to inflexible computers, and convinced, or not, to our friends talk. Kansei, i.e., affection, is a mechanism responsible for each person's cognitive process of the world. This mechanism subjectively accepts and interprets multimedia and multimodal information from other people, objects, and environment. It uses this subjective view as the basis for the person's action. "Kansei" is an important perspective for realizing manufacturing and information service to attract each individual consumer. This perspective is supported by the human-centered science and technology of "kansei engineering," or affective engineering. This paper proposes the framework of Kansei modeling through unconscious interaction with electronic gadgets.