To create products that are better fit for purpose, manufacturers require new methods for gaining insights into product experience in the wild at scale. “Chatty Factories” is a concept that explores the transformative potential of placing IoT-enabled data-driven systems at the core of design and manufacturing processes, aligned to the Industry 4.0 paradigm. In this paper, we propose a model that enables new forms of agile engineering product development via “chatty” products. Products relay their “experiences” from the consumer world back to designers and product engineers through the mediation provided by embedded sensors, IoT, and data-driven design tools. Our model aims to identify product “experiences” to support the insights into product use. To this end, we create an experiment to: (i) collect sensor data at 100 Hz sampling rate from a “Chatty device” (device with sensors) for six common everyday activities that drive produce experience: standing, walking, sitting, dropping and picking up of the device, placing the device stationary on a side table, and a vibrating surface; (ii) pre-process and manually label the product use activity data; (iii) compare a total of four Unsupervised Machine Learning models (three classic and the fuzzy C-means algorithm) for product use activity recognition for each unique sensor; and (iv) present and discuss our findings. The empirical results demonstrate the feasibility of applying unsupervised machine learning algorithms for clustering product use activity. The highest obtained F-measure is 0.87, and MCC of 0.84, when the Fuzzy C-means algorithm is applied for clustering, outperforming the other three algorithms applied.

With increasing automation of manufacturing processes (focusing on technologies such as robotics and human-robot interaction), there is a realisation that the manufacturing process and the artefacts/products it produces can be better connected post-production. Built on this requirement, a “chatty" factory involves creating products which are able to send data back to the manufacturing/production environment as they are used, whilst still ensuring user privacy. The intended use of a product during design phase may different significantly from actual usage. Understanding how this data can be used to support continuous product refinement, and how the manufacturing process can be dynamically adapted based on the availability of this data provides a number of opportunities. We describe how data collected on product use can be used to: (i) classify product use; (ii) associate a label with product use using unsupervised learning—making use of edge-based analytics; (iii) transmission of this data to a cloud environment where labels can be compared across different products of the same type. Federated learning strategies are used on edge devices to ensure that any data captured from a product can be analysed locally (ensuring data privacy).