Digital Signage that Reacts to Smoking in Non-Smoking Zone

Abstract

We conceived an idea to employ digital signage to caution against bad manners in public spaces. We notice that direct warnings such as vocal announces and advertisements are easily ignored, we conceived the idea of nudging a person to deter from continuing it, as a different approach to caution against such behavior. At the same time, many digital applications are concentrated on mobile phones, and the use of these applications in the device leads to addiction issues. Considering these situations, we aim to design a warning with an interactive function and seamlessly integrate it into a daily living environment. To demonstrate the concept, we designed digital signage content that interactively reacts to smoking. The characters in the content will start to cough or wave a hand to indicate that smoking at that place is not appropriate in the surroundings. We adopt a non-direct expression to nudge a person to stop the act instead of making a direct warning and embed the function into the environment. We implemented the content that dynamically reacts and the system that controls the multiple signages simultaneously by detecting the smoking gesture. We examined this approach by setting three signages at a place and confirmed that they appeared as a standard advertisement in a normal state and functioned as planned when a person exhibited gestures associated with smoking in the area. We also conducted supplemental surveys on an improved gesture detection method and effective content representations. Through this work, we were able to confirm that designing a digital function in such a way that it can be seamlessly integrated into the background environment is feasible. Future research should focus on the impact on anonymous people in real-world circumstances.