Innovative Smart appliances with an interactive approach and their consumers are growing exponentially. Smart refrigerators are such a prominent intelligent kitchenware and hence published studies on smart homes and smarter kitchen appliances have been around in recent years. Although published research is available on smart refrigerators which describe its use for managing items stored in it a...

Recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence and data analytics are facilitating the automation of some consumer chores (e.g., in smart homes and in self-driving cars) and allow the emergence of big-data-driven, micro-targeting marketing practices (e.g., personalized content recommendation algorithms).We contend that those developments can generate a tension for marketers, consum...

The ongoing upgrade of electricity meters to smart ones has opened a new market of intelligent services to analyze the recorded meter data. This paper introduces an open architecture and a unified framework for deducing user behavior from its smart main electricity meter data and presenting the results in a natural language. The framework allows a fast exploration and integration of a variety o...

Defaults have such powerful and pervasive effects on consumer behavior that they could be considered "hidden persuaders" in sonríe settings, ignoring defaults is not a sound option for marketers or consumer policy makers. The authors identify three theoretical causes of default effects—impiied endorsement, cognitive biases, and effort—to guide thought on the appropriate marketer and policy make...

Traditionally, most consumers of electricity pay for their consumptions according to a fixed rate. With the advancement of Smart Grid technologies, large-scale implementation of variable-rate metering becomes more practical. As a result, consumers will be able to control their electricity consumption in an automated fashion, where one possible scheme is to have each individual maximize its own ...

The association of smart mobile devices and lab-on-chip technologies offers unprecedented opportunities for the emergence of direct-to-consumer in vitro medical diagnostics applications. Despite their clear transformative potential, obstacles remain to the large-scale disruption and long-lasting success of these systems in the consumer market. For instance, the increasing level of complexity of...