Environmental Effect on Emotion in Waiting Areas Based on Kansei Engineering and Affective Neuroscience

In general, for health care centers it is vital to know the kind and the intensity of emotions felt by its patients and how to influence their quality of life and their response to therapies. In particular, waiting areas in which patients spend a lot of time without significant interactions is an important focus of this study. Recent studies suggest that a quality in fact and in perception is two significant parts, which affect and play a powerful role in an overall satisfaction in health care. The aim of this study is to understand how to increase positive and decrease negative emotions by a re-design of waiting areas inside health care centers where patients spend a considerable amount of time without any significant interactions. To measure the quality of satisfaction felt by patients inside of such an environment we refer to their emotions that we model basing on Affective Neuroscience. According to Panksepp, we have a categorized and unambiguous number of emotions, precisely defined from a neuroscientific and physiologic point of view: SEEKING, PLAY, CARE, FEAR, GRIEF, RAGE and LUST. We collect Kansei words and structure them with these emotions. We perform 600 surveys on 200 patients in 4 different waiting areas found in 2 hospitals to reveal differences in perceptions. We conduct experiments and our results lead us to several considerations about how to design desirable emotional characteristics of a waiting area.