Interactive Automatic Refrigerator Door for Emotional Satisfaction

Abstract

Automatic door control technology for home appliances is becoming more common, however, there are few studies on human interaction in the automatic door of a refrigerator. This paper explores the role of the artifact by examining how automatic-door movements affect people’s perception and emotional satisfaction. In this study, participants who purchased a refrigerator viewed five video clips depicting a refrigerator with various door speeds and movement trajectories. At the same time, participants were asked to fill out a survey and open-ended response. Results show that there was a high emotional satisfaction associated with the door with maximum degrees of opening and closing. We also found that the emotional satisfaction strongly related to automatic door recognition. This suggests that automatically controlled doors can have a positive effect on emotional satisfaction and the specific situation in which smart artifacts interact with user. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.