Designing an Elevator Open/Close Button That Can Be Easily Distinguished Using the Facial Expression

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to verify the effect of a new re-opening/closing button designed to enhance the ease of discrimination under conditions where misjudgments are likely to occur. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment with university students as subjects. The following three designs were compared as elevator re-opening/closing buttons. The first is the general design. The second is a partially optimized design for the size and color of objects using illustrations of common designs. The third is an overall optimized design including illustrations. The rate of correct answers, required time, and rate of gazing time was used as evaluation indices for ease of discrimination. As a result, among the re-opening/closing buttons of general design, the re-opening/closing button expressing the open/close in a triangle direction in particular caused about 30% of erroneous answers. On the other hand, with the fully optimized design, we were able to significantly reduce errors in pushing. Furthermore, the partially optimized design and the fully optimized design shortened the hesitation time. From the above, in this study, it was clarified that the decision of opening and closing of the elevator can be made easily by partial optimization and overall optimization aiming at making the decision of the re-opening/closing button of the elevator easy.