Design of elder-friendly auditory signals for microwave ovens

Recent house electrical appliances generate a number of auditory signals, when a user operates an appliance or an appliance draws attention to a user. In this paper, we focus on multi-functional microwave ovens, which commonly have several auditory signals for user's operation, error occurrence, completion of cooking, and so on. A wide variety of auditory signals for current microwave ovens have two problems: it is difficult for users to image what the auditory signals inform, and the auditory signals including high frequency components are not friendly for elderly users. In this paper, popular auditory signals for microwave ovens were subjectively evaluated with/without an elderly-simulated band-pass filter, which simulated an averaged audiogram of elder people, on the five grade scales of easiness of perception, unpleasantness, and emergency. Experimental results suggest that young and elderly people might imagine different function for a single auditory signal. Finally, suitable auditory signals both for young and elderly users are proposed in the viewpoints of frequency and temporal patterns.