A hybrid intelligence approach for sustainable service innovation of smart and connected product: A case study

Nowadays, smart and connected product (SCP) is gradually replacing the traditional functional products, which has attracted widespread attention from the industry and academia. Service innovation, as a crucial part of SCP iterative improvement, is a multi-criteria decision-making (DM) process facilitated by intelligent automation (IA) and cognitive technologies. However, product user’s intelligence (e.g. physiological feeling) that can intuitively reflect and evaluate the product service satisfaction is rarely considered in the process of service innovation. Hence, it is difficult to measure the product users’ preferences with precise numerical terms to make a strategic decision. In order to fill this gap, a hybrid intelligence approach is proposed to perform the service innovation for SCP. The product-user data (e.g. subjective data and physiological data) and product-sensor data are collected and used for the process of service innovation. A smart group spinning bicycle system is presented as an elaborated case study to illustrate the proposed architecture and approach. The service innovation of real-time and dynamic monitoring, user participation improvement and smart feedback manners are achieved. In addition, an ergonomic experiment is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in implementing the service innovation for SCP.