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Abstract
When the world first massage chair was invented by Mr. Fujimoto Nobuo in 1954, the technique of massage chair has been constantly evolving due to the rapid development of electronic technology ever since. In nowadays, massage chair is not only limited to the traditional roller massage function and all major manufacturers are doing their very best to extend the functions accordingly. For instance, by combining several and dozens of airbags to create full body pressured massage, auto-detection of body shape, various massage points heating function etc. The traditional simple on/off control can no longer satisfy the sophisticated need of high-end massage chair. The controlling device has also been evolving from the traditional switch to multi combinations of manual controller and even remote controller. The controller chip has also been upgraded from 16 bit to 32 bit and the mono-color display will soon be replaced by the upcoming multi-points touch pad. All the manufacturers are striving for innovations to add values and selling points to their brands and products.
OSIM is the first brand to synchronize music and massage chair via APP software of mobile phone in 2012. It has not only extended the product life-cycle but also successfully increased the selling price by 15%. The Chinese massage chair manufacturer – RongTai has also launched a new high-end massage chair (RT-8600) in the same year using bluetooth to transfer music to the built-in speakers in the chair. The success of the new launch has promoted the brand and sales greatly.
Therefore, all massage chair manufacturers have started in paying more attention to the application and function of mobile phone software, hoping to increase brand equity and added value of products to boost the market share of high-end massage chair market.
There are three objectives of this research: (1) To build the analytical structure of four indicators including brand equity, control function, information function and the cost of massage chair using mobile applications; (2) To integrate the key indicators through Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and to explore the key factors of massage chair using mobile application system; (3) To acquire the relative weights and sequences of individual indicators, criteria and factors through market survey in order to identify the priority of estimated factors.
The survey will classify the targeted samples into 4 groups to investigate the different perception of factors among massage chair users, suppliers, sellers and experts via emails and interviews to conduct the market survey. There are total 60 copies of questionnaires to be delivered and after deducting the invalid questionnaires whose Consistency Ratio is greater than 0.1, total 35 valid questionnaires were recovered.
The findings of this study shows that among the key factors that will impact the usage of mobile application system on massage chair, the weight ranking is “brand equity indicator” (0.311), , “controllability indicator” (0.247), “cost indicator (0.197) and then “information function indicator” (0.162).
As of various surveyed groups, the ranking of the important indicators is not exactly the same.
The Expert Group : ①“brand equity”(0.454) ②”controllability”(0.211) ③ ”cost”(0.18) ④”information”(0.135)
The Supplier Group: ①”cost”(0.249) ②”brand equity”(0.236) ③”controllability”(0.206) ④”information”(0.189)
The Seller Group : ①”brand equity”(0.358) ②”cost”(0.222) ③”controllability”(0.188) ④”information”(0.151)
The User Group: ①”controllability”(0.380) ②”brand equity”(0.195) ③”information”(0.173) ④”cost”(0.135)
Finally, to summarize the findings of this research and provide suggestion for continuous study.
Keywords: Massage Chairs, Mobile Applications , Analytic Hierarchy Process,
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