An approach to the emotional design of female nursing scrubs

Abstract

Nurses often encounter negative emotions such as fatigue, boredom, anxiety and fear in the course of their nursing duties, and one of the efficient approaches to improve their emotions is to wear the proper nursing scrubs during their tasks. This paper presents a work with the overall objective to have an emotionally tailored apparel design of nursing scrubs. To reach this objective, the study first mines Kansei words to recognize nurses’ emotions in nursing scrubs domain. Then, design attributes and their corresponding attribute levels for nursing scrubs are identified and determined by applying the rank sum ratio method. Furthermore, a model mapping nurses’ emotions to design attributes of nursing scrubs is established by employing the entropy-weight technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution approach. The study yields two significant contributions: (a) presenting the first ever emotion recognition for nurses, which provides a domain-specific foundation for investigating nurses’ psychological wellbeing; (b) constructing a model to conduct the emotional apparel design of female nursing scrubs, which offers a guide to improve preferred and satisfied female nursing scrubs for nurses, and thus positive emotions will be experienced during their nursing duties.