Formulating Kansei concept of assistive device for people with physical disabilities

The mobility limitations in daily activities for people with physical disabilities have rapidly spurred on various inventions of assistive devices to fulfill their needs. However, misunderstanding of specifications and conflicting of design and expectation do certainly exist between the user with physical disabilities and the designer. This phenomenon leads to a big gap between psychological aspects of human and technical element of product used. Thus, this paper proposes Kansei Engineering (KE) technology to investigate the affective values beneath the products and incorporate them into design specifications. An exploratory study is conducted to derive Kansei words for assistive devices. Experts are asked to perform affinity process using KJ Method and classify Kansei words into four segments which are sensational, physical, aesthetic, and operational. As a result, 95 Kansei words are clustered into 10 sub headers which contained in those four Kansei segments. These results will become a reference model for Kansei concepts of assistive device for people with physical disability to designer and user in defining device specifications and meeting user's implicit needs.