Modeling Relationships Among Affective Measures of Food Choice: Acceptance, Emotions And Satisfaction

The importance of ascertaining holistic product and consumer understanding beyond liking in the product development process cannot be overstated. This research investigated the role of attribute performance on satisfaction in explaining the relationship between food-evoked emotions and sensory preferences, and examined factors influencing the sensory-emotion profile of food products. In the first phase of this research, a series of consumer studies were conducted using eggs as a test product. First, the extent to which critical product attributes contribute to the satisfaction of quality requirements and purchase intent was determined using Kano modeling concepts. The emotional profile of the product was then examined in attribute presence and absence conditions to evaluate impact of egg quality types. Subsequently, the data were analyzed to elucidate relationships between emotions, satisfaction performance measures and product acceptability. For the expansive aspects of intrinsic, extrinsic, aesthetic, expedient and wholesome characteristics influencing purchase decision of eggs, 8 elements were identified as must-be, 1 attractive, 1 one-dimensional, and 10 indifferent Kano attributes. Attribute absence rather than presence evoked greater consumer discriminating emotions, and emotions and acceptability were more correlated for attribute absence than presence. Emotion and attribute satisfaction performance scores were better predictors of liking in combination than alone. However, emotions in attribute absence outperformed that in its presence, reflecting impact of deeper emotional conceptualizations in attribute absence being a better predictor of liking. Associations were found between Kano attributes and positive emotions. Attractive Kano-related attributes were distinctly drivers of liking, separate from both positive and negative emotions. No evidence of moderating effects of satisfaction performance of expedient egg attributes on the relationship between emotions and liking was found. In the second phase of this research, the relative effects of color and labeling cues on sensory perception, emotional responses and the sensory-emotion space were evaluated using sweeteners as a food model. Results demonstrated additive effects of color and labeling cues on flavor perception and emotions, contrary to significant interactions on their sensory-emotion profile. Identified associations between attribute performance on consumer satisfaction, emotions and acceptability in this research offer new insights on food-evoked emotions in product development

INTEGRATING KANO MODEL WITH DATA MINING TECHNIQUES TO ENHANCE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

The business world is becoming more competitive from time to time; therefore, businesses are forced to improve their strategies in every single aspect. So, determining the elements that contribute to the clients\u27 contentment is one of the critical needs of businesses to develop successful products in the market. The Kano model is one of the models that help determine which features must be included in a product or service to improve customer satisfaction. The model focuses on highlighting the most relevant attributes of a product or service along with customers’ estimation of how these attributes can be used to predict satisfaction with specific services or products. This research aims at developing a method to integrate the Kano model and data mining approaches to select relevant attributes that drive customer satisfaction, with a specific focus on higher education. The significant contribution of this research is to improve the quality of United Arab Emirates University academic support and development services provided to their students by solving the problem of selecting features that are not methodically correlated to customer satisfaction, which could reduce the risk of investing in features that could ultimately be irrelevant to enhancing customer satisfaction. Questionnaire data were collected from 646 students from United Arab Emirates University. The experiment suggests that Extreme Gradient Boosting Regression can produce the best results for this kind of problem. Based on the integration of the Kano model and the feature selection method, the number of features used to predict customer satisfaction is minimized to four features. It was found that either Chi-Square or Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) features selection model’s integration with the Kano model giving higher values of Pearson correlation coefficient and R2. Moreover, the prediction was made using union features between the Kano model\u27s most important features and the most frequent features among 8 clusters. It shows high-performance results

An Integration of Kano Model, QFD and Six Sigma to Present a New Description of DFSS

Business competitiveness is no longer a choice but a matter of survival in global market place. For any company, the continuous and timely development of new products and services, which include creative features that are expected to satisfy customers, is essential to remain competitive. At present, the companies not only focus on customer satisfaction, but also want to please them that ultimately lead them towards loyalty in future. Therefore, in-depth and quick understanding of the dynamic needs of customers can be important in the development of products and markets through a short period of time. However, there have been numerous failures in product development efforts leading towards enormous waste of time and resources. One of the reasons for this is the lack of a structured and comprehensive process for product development that utilizes powerful models and methodologies, such as Kano model, QFD and modern QI methodologies as well as the principles of concurrent engineering including cross-functional teams and timely communication. As all these methodologies share the same goals of pursuing customer satisfaction thus their integration into a common model is possible and beneficial Kano model strengthens the modern QI methodologies such as Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma approach and further enhances customers’ satisfaction level. Six Sigma is used to achieve high-levels of stability through reduction in process and product variation. This directs to an almost defect free level which is also the focus of DFSS (or DMADV) building quality upstream for existing products and new product development methods. This level is essential to the customer, but not necessarily economic. Therefore, it is important to understand the customer's needs and requirements of the target, and understanding about company's own capabilities and costs. In addition to integrating Kano model and QFD into Six Sigma, the proposed approach extends previous works on these models. This paper presents a new description of the DFSS structured approach including a simple way for calculating the degree of importance for customer requirements with the adoption of Kano factor (K).An integrated approach for DFSS is proposed for practitioners to strategically understand the VOC. It included the use of different powerful tools such as Kano model, QFD, Taguchi’s QLF, TRIZ, AHP, DOE, SIPOC and FMEA. All of these tools are relevant and have consensus in terms of solving customer problems to achieve customer satisfaction. They also complement each other and can be integrated together, within DFSS, to form a better methodology. Therefore, the integration of these tools for the DFSS method is considered to be possible and useful. This work extended the previous works regarding these tools, included new ideas and incorporated them in a new model. Kano model lies in the center of the framework as it forms a basis for a profound understanding of the customer needs. The DFSS methodology utilizes Deming’s PDCA cycle through the DMADV phases for Cl. Kano model strengthens DFSS and brings an intelligent approach to understand and prioritize customer requirements. In addition, a generic case study is used to demonstrate some of the steps in the proposed methodology about how it can be implemented. Keywords: Kano model, QFD, QI, Six Sigma, VOC, DFSS, QLF, FMEA, CI, DMADV, SIPOC, Customer satisfaction, product developmen

Developing Domain Ontology for Nigerian History

Background: Nigeria, which is the most populous country in Africa, located in the West of Africa has a rich political and cultural history. Although, Nigeria has a valid history, the documentation of a significant portion of the historical information is vague and anecdotal because a lot of it is oral, which makes it susceptible to distortion. There is also poor electronic documentation, with a large chunk of history captured in print - history books, media report and museum artifacts. Objective: To develop a domain ontology for Nigerian history which is intended to provide viable support for sundry automation needs that require historical knowledge. Results: The NHO (Nigerian History Ontology) has been developed using a semi- automated approach that involved extraction of terms from textual sources and eventual conceptualization, modeling, and development using the Protégé Ontology Editor. The NHO (Nigerian History Ontology) developed ontology reveals a potential to competently support knowledge-based software endeavor. Also compared with Gold Standard ontology, it was found to be rich in content. Conclusion: We have presented the details of the process of developing a domain ontology for Nigeria history, which is the first of its kind in terms of focus (Nigeria), and perspectives (political, cultural). The NHO is a documentation of Nigerian historical knowledge for meaningful use, which makes the knowledge useful by both humans and software agents. It also provides an electronic archive of Nigerian history in a compact and easily accessible way

Final results of the second prospective AIEOP protocol for pediatric intracranial ependymoma

BACKGROUND: This prospective study stratified patients by surgical resection (complete = NED vs incomplete = ED) and centrally reviewed histology (World Health Organization [WHO] grade II vs III). METHODS: WHO grade II/NED patients received focal radiotherapy (RT) up to 59.4 Gy with 1.8 Gy/day. Grade III/NED received 4 courses of VEC (vincristine, etoposide, cyclophosphamide) after RT. ED patients received 1-4 VEC courses, second-look surgery, and 59.4 Gy followed by an 8-Gy boost in 2 fractions on still measurable residue. NED children aged 1-3 years with grade II tumors could receive 6 VEC courses alone. RESULTS: From January 2002 to December 2014, one hundred sixty consecutive children entered the protocol (median age, 4.9 y; males, 100). Follow-up was a median of 67 months. An infratentorial origin was identified in 110 cases. After surgery, 110 patients were NED, and 84 had grade III disease. Multiple resections were performed in 46/160 children (28.8%). A boost was given to 24/40 ED patients achieving progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) rates of 58.1% and 68.7%, respectively, in this poor prognosis subgroup. For the whole series, 5-year PFS and OS rates were 65.4% and 81.1%, with no toxic deaths. On multivariable analysis, NED status and grade II were favorable for OS, and for PFS grade II remained favorable. CONCLUSIONS: In a multicenter collaboration, this trial accrued the highest number of patients published so far, and results are comparable to the best single-institution series. The RT boost, when feasible, seemed effective in improving prognosis. Even after multiple procedures, complete resection confirmed its prognostic strength, along with tumor grade. Biological parameters emerging in this series will be the object of future correlatives and reports

Apply QFD methodology to capture ‘unheard’ voices of UK care home residents and translate them into quality measurement targets for future improvement

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonIn the planning and delivery of services the voice and choice of consumers have appeared as the foremost key factors. For a large number of organisations the received feedback from customers about the quality of services, which are the criteria and indication of their level of satisfaction play a crucial role in the improvement of quality. Although across developed western communities, the importance of customers’ views has gained acceptance, few studies have been dedicated to the exploration of the voice of the residents in care homes. The review of the literature regarding residents’ satisfaction and quality in care homes revealed that the voices of residents in care homes are usually not heard or are absent. Moreover, the adoption of quality improvement tools in health care has lagged behind that in other industries and there is generally a failure to use an appropriate methodology in care homes, one based on residents’ voice, for improving quality. As a result, the main aim of this research is to investigate residents’ voice regarding improving their satisfaction in care homes. Further, the researcher seeks to obtain data by using an appropriate methodology to assist care home managers in enhancing the quality of the services they offer by assigning weights to quality indicators pertaining to improving quality and residents’ levels of satisfaction. For this purpose, this research employs both qualitative and quantitative approaches to develop a research process entailing: (1) a comprehensive literature review to recognise the phenomenon; (2) interviews with fifteen older people who lived in three different care homes in order to discover the most important residents’ needs and requirements in such homes; (3) a resident survey with one hundred and two residents in thirty five care homes. These were conducted to assess their preferences for the importance of demanded qualities; their satisfaction with provided services and the attributes of each demanded quality based on the Kano model, in order to identify the priority of improvement. Next, (4) there was the development of the House of Quality (HoQ) to optimize quality to assure residents’ satisfaction; and finally, (5) an evaluation study was conducted with thirteen service providers, in order to assess the accuracy and appropriateness of the methodology. This research has contributed towards a better understanding of the residents’ voice, and applying it for enhancing quality and residents’ satisfaction in care homes. For the first time residents’ requirements are prioritised and classified in this context through accurate methods. Moreover, an understanding of the attributes of care home residents’ needs in relation to a Kano model has been elicited. The novelty of this proposed methodology is in utilising the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in care homes to translate the voice of residents’ regarding their requirements into service planning. The research methodology and results facilitate care home managers with a hierarchy for improvement planning at both service and executive management levels

Reducing Transportation Energy Consumption by Daily Commuters

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106049/1/ME589F13Section881Project1_Report.pd

A user experience‐based toolset for automotive human‐machine interface technology development

The development of new automotive Human-Machine Interface (HMI) technologies must consider the competing and often conflicting demands of commercial value, User Experience (UX) and safety. Technology innovation offers manufacturers the opportunity to gain commercial advantage in a competitive and crowded marketplace, leading to an increase in the features and functionality available to the driver. User response to technology influences the perception of the brand as a whole, so it is important that in-vehicle systems provide a high-quality user experience. However, introducing new technologies into the car can also increase accident risk. The demands of usability and UX must therefore be balanced against the requirement for driver safety. Adopting a technology-focused business strategy carries a degree of risk, as most innovations fail before they reach the market. Obtaining clear and relevant information on the UX and safety of new technologies early in their development can help to inform and support robust product development (PD) decision making, improving product outcomes. In order to achieve this, manufacturers need processes and tools to evaluate new technologies, providing customer-focused data to drive development. This work details the development of an Evaluation Toolset for automotive HMI technologies encompassing safety-related functional metrics and UX measures. The Toolset consists of four elements: an evaluation protocol, based on methods identified from the Human Factors, UX and Sensory Science literature; a fixed-base driving simulator providing a context-rich, configurable evaluation environment, supporting both hardware and software-based technologies; a standardised simulation scenario providing a repeatable basis for technology evaluations, allowing comparisons across multiple technologies and studies; and a technology scorecard that collates and presents evaluation data to support PD decision making processes