Context-awareness for the design of Smart-product service systems: Literature review

Abstract

Smart-Product Service Systems (S-PSS) emerge as a novel strategy to integrate smart products with advanced digital capabilities and their related e-services to satisfy user’s needs in highly context-dependent environments. S-PSS has the potential to generate a transition towards more economically, ecologically and socially sustainable practices and business models due to its adaptive capacities. However, being able to exploit the digital capabilities of smart products and their services is still limited in design and even more to improve the user experience. For this reason, this study will focus on the Context-awareness capability that has been defined by multiple scholars as one of the most relevant properties that defines the smartness of a product. Following a systematic literature review approach, this work makes the following contributions: (1) it provides a bibliometric analysis using a cluster keyword map to analyze the most researched topics in S-PSS relevant to the design, user experience and analyze their connections; (2) an analysis of the case studies presented in the literature according to the life cycle of context-aware applications; and (3) establishes a research direction for the user experience and design of the S-PSS.