Individual and unorganized sports with a health-related focus, such as recreational running, have grown extensively in the last decade. Consistent with this development, there has been an exponential increase in the availability and use of electronic monitoring devices such as smartphone applications (apps) and sports watches. These electronic devices could provide support and monitoring for unorganized runners, who have no access to professional trainers and coaches. The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into the characteristics of event runners who use running-related apps and sports watches. This knowledge is useful from research, design, and marketing perspectives to adequately address unorganized runners’ needs, and to support them in healthy and sustainable running through personalized technology. Data used in this study are drawn from the standardized online Eindhoven Running Survey 2014 (ERS14). In total, 2,172 participants in the Half Marathon Eindhoven 2014 completed the questionnaire (a response rate of 40.0%). Binary logistic regressions were used to analyze the impact of socio-demographic variables, running-related variables, and psychographic characteristics on the use of running-related apps and sports watches. Next, consumer profiles were identified. The results indicate that the use of monitoring devices is affected by socio-demographics as well as sports-related and psychographic variables, and this relationship depends on the type of monitoring device. Therefore, distinctive consumer profiles have been developed to provide a tool for designers and manufacturers of electronic running-related devices to better target (unorganized) runners’ needs through personalized and differentiated approaches. Apps are more likely to be used by younger, less experienced and involved runners. Hence, apps have the potential to target this group of novice, less trained, and unorganized runners. In contrast, sports watches are more likely to be used by a different group of runners, older and more experienced runners with higher involvement. Although apps and sports watches may potentially promote and stimulate sports participation, these electronic devices do require a more differentiated approach to target specific needs of runners. Considerable efforts in terms of personalization and tailoring have to be made to develop the full potential of these electronic devices as drivers for healthy and sustainable sports participation.

No abstract

No abstract

Light-emitting diode (LED) lamp has received great attention as a potential replacement for the more commercially available lighting technology, such as incandescence and fluorescence lamps. LED which is the main component of LED lamp has a very long lifetime. This means that no or very few failures are expected during LED lamp testing. Therefore, degradation testing and modelling are needed. Because the complexity of modern lighting system is increasing, it is possible that more than one degradation failures dominate the system reliability. If degradation paths of the system's performance characteristics (PCs) tend to be comonotone there is a likely dependence between the PCs because of the system's common usage history. In this paper, a bivariate constant stress degradation data model is proposed. The model accommodates assumptions of dependency between PCs and allows the use of different marginal degradation distribution functions. Consequently, a better system reliability estimation can be expected from this model than from a model with independent PCs assumption. The proposed model is applied to an actual LED lamps experiment data.

Currently, many businesses in the consumer electronics industry are facing an increasing number of consumer complaints, despite the application of quality tools that proved to be very powerful in the past. We assessed over 20 new product development projects, to understand the reasons behind the rising number of consumer complaints. We found that businesses are developing more innovative products that are brought to the market faster, with inherently higher uncertainties on the consumer expectations of these products. Current analyses of consumer complaints solely focus on checking if the product is functioning according to the technical specification, and these analyses show a rising number of consumer complaints where no failure could be established. When looking at product quality and reliability from a consumer's perspective, we found that consumers complain not only about technical product failures but also when the product does not satisfy their expectations. In this paper we will take the perspective of the consumer to analyse dissatisfaction with new products from various available sources, which were not set-up for quality and reliability purposes. We will show that analysing information from these sources gives better information, especially on the non-technical failures compared with the traditional quality and reliability sources.