Smart products not only provide novel functionalities, but also may establish new business models, markets, or distribution channels, strengthen relationships with consumers, and/or add smart remote services. While many technical obstacles of such products have already been overcome, the broad market dissemination of smart products still poses some vital managerial challenges for decision makers. In this paper, we outline the technical potential and future trends of smart consumer products, discuss economic challenges in four scopes, namely, preference-based new product development, market analysis, supply chain design, and industry development, and, in particular, we highlight research perspectives for management science in this promising field.

The research field of sonification, a subset of the topic of auditory display, has developed rapidly in recent decades. It brings together interests from the areas of data mining, exploratory data analysis, human-computer interfaces, and computer music. Sonification presents information by using sound (particularly nonspeech), so that the user of an auditory display obtains a deeper understanding of the data or processes under investigation by listening.

People with cognitive disabilities such as dementia and intellectual disabilities tend to have problems in coordinating steps in the execution of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) due to limited capabilities in cognitive functioning. To successfully perform ADLs, these people are reliant on the assistance of human caregivers. This leads to a decrease of independence for care recipients and imposes a high burden on caregivers. Assistive Technology for Cognition (ATC) aims to compensate for decreased cognitive functions. ATC systems provide automatic assistance in task execution by delivering appropriate prompts which enable the user to perform ADLs without any assistance of a human caregiver. This leads to an increase of the user’s independence and to a relief of caregiver’s burden. In this article, we describe the design, development and evaluation of a novel ATC system. The TEBRA (TEeth BRushing Assistance) system supports people with moderate cognitive disabilities in the execution of brushing teeth. A main requirement for the acceptance of ATC systems is context awareness: explicit feedback from the user is not necessary to provide appropriate assistance. Furthermore, an ATC system needs to handle spatial and temporal variance in the execution of behaviors such as different movement characteristics and different velocities. The TEBRA system handles spatial variance in a behavior recognition component based on a Bayesian network classifier. A dynamic timing model deals with temporal variance by adapting to different velocities of users during a trial. We evaluate a fully functioning prototype of the TEBRA system in a study with people with cognitive disabilities. The main aim of the study is to analyze the technical performance of the system and the user’s behavior in the interaction with the system with regard to the main hypothesis: is the TEBRA system able to increase the user’s independence in the execution of brushing teeth?

As many users who are charged with process monitoring need to focus mainly on other work while performing monitoring as a secondary task, monitoring systems that purely rely on visual means are often not well suited for this purpose. Sonification, the presentation of data as (non-speech) sound, has proven in several studies that it can help in guiding the user's attention, especially in scenarios where process monitoring is performed in parallel with a different, main task. However, there are several aspects that have not been investigated in this area so far, for example if a continuous soundscape can guide the user's attention better than one that is based on auditory cues. We have developed a system that allows reproducible research to answer such questions. In this system, the participants’ performance both for the main task (simulated by simple arithmetic problems) and for the secondary task (a simulation of a production process) can be measured in a more fine-grained manner than has been the case for existing research in this field. In a within-subject study (n=18), we compared three monitoring conditions – visual only, visual + auditory alerts and a condition combining the visual mode with continuous sonification of process events based on a forest soundscape. Participants showed significantly higher process monitoring performances in the continuous sonification condition, compared to the other two modes. The performance in the main task was at the same time not significantly affected by the continuous sonification