Product-Awareness through Smart Audio Navigation in a Retail Environment

In this paper, we introduce a method to make personalized music freely selectable for each customer in a retail environment. Using a web interface, the customer can create an electronic shopping list, associate items with recommended music, and thus create his individual shopping play list. The provided instrumental music tracks are additionally categorized by their emotional expression to allow a selection based on the user´s favorite mood. The product-associated music tracks start playing at the customer´s instrumented shopping cart as soon as he enters specific product departments where items from his shopping list are located. We also introduce a service to provide product-awareness through non-speech audio cues. This location aware service notifies customers when they come closer to products that are listed on their shopping lists. We use a two stage notification approach by creating user-centric notification zones. Depending on the customer´s distance to the product, he gets notified by an ambient or arousal noise that is mixed into the background music. In doing so, customers become aware of products in their surrounding area that are listed on their personal shopping list.