Systematic Design Method of Auditory Interface for Home Appliances

There is a growing interest to introduce auditory interface into home appliances to improve their usability. However two issues hinder the penetration of utilizing sound for home appliances. (1) High design cost Information sound design requires both significant expertise and long development time. Information sounds are usually designed by a cut-and-try approach, because no systematic methods are known. (2) Floods of similar information sounds in residences Many sounds have been installed in appliances without consistent design rules. Thus, similar sounds like beep are in flood over a home. The residents cannot distinguish these sounds. In this paper, we propose a systematic design method of auditory interface as below. (1) Framework of information sounds required for home appliances. (2) Design rules based on the framework. Several design rules were supposed on the framework, and brushed up through two experiments with test subjects. One experiment was conducted to find out which of sound parameters was mapped onto an operating function, and the other experiment was conducted to know which of operating functions was awaked by a sound. In these experiments, multivariate analysis was applied to finding out the correlation between sound parameter and operating function. The systematic design method was established through these experiments. We applied the method to obtain a sound set of an electrical cooking heater and confirmed improvement of usability through an evaluation test.