Executive Summary

The affective Keitai is a hypothetical concept of a mobile handset that can understand, and react to the moods of its user. The hypothetical device can have several user-centric functional enhancements, and can increase the affective bonding between the user and the device. The concept is a theoretical extension to the efforts to make mobile devices more contextually aware, and pushes awareness of physical environment to include that of the psychological states of the user. It also builds on current academic efforts to increase the understanding of computer interfaces of their user’s affect. In order to probe the commercial potential of the technology, as well as understand the main related issues from a consumers’ perspective, two focus groups were conducted, with participants in the 30-something working professional demographic segment. The participants generally showed skepticism for the technology, the main reasons being the fear of ceding control to a machine, the doubt whether technology can ever be genuinely affective, satisfaction with current functional and technological capabilities of the Keitai, more emphasis on form factors than increased functionality, as well as privacy issues. These findings might be due to the age bracket of the participants, to the abstract character of the idea and the lack of a functional prototype to experiment with, or to the lack of positive feedback from early adopter types. The participants are not representative of the total pool of potential users. In order to have a better understanding of the target segments and their propensity to adopt the technology, interested marketers should use the findings of the groups as a basis for consumer surveys directed at a wider pool of demographic or psychographic segments.