FIELD

The present disclosure is generally directed to communicating user experiences. More specifically, the present application is directed to a portable real-time experience communications device and closed monitoring system.

DESCRIPTION OF THE RELATED ART

Mobile devices such as cellular phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), smart phones, tablet computers, other wirelessly enabled devices, other portable handheld devices, hands-free/heads-up devices, wearables, such as, for example, Fitbit® wearables, Jawbone® fitness trackers, and the Apple® Watch, have successfully penetrated and been adopted, by the general consumer market and by many government entities. Functionalities on mobile devices are generally performed by software applications either in the form of software components that are built-in to the device's mobile operating system or separate mobile applications (also known as “mobile apps” or “apps”) that run on the device's operating system. Recently, the development and use of mobile apps has become prevalent and now exist across a wide array of mobile device platforms. Individuals, businesses, and government agencies have come to enjoy, appreciate and rely on the convenience, flexibility and mobility of mobile devices as a means to readily obtain access to information, facilitate communications and interact with friends, family, colleagues and business entities, other friendly deployed units, etc. Persons are exceedingly more comfortable using mobile devices to communicate their thoughts, opinions, and ideas, and frequently elect to do so, rather than by verbal and/or personal interactions. At the same time, persons exceedingly express feelings of being isolated or alone despite their own personal choice to use mobile devices as their primary means of communicating. Many mobile apps also require a user to provide personal information, and/or permit the app provider to track the location of the user, which raises privacy concerns and increases the risk that the users' sensitive information be exposed in a data breach. Additionally, as the number of mobile apps on users' phones continues to increase, the time a user spends in trying to find a particular app also increases.

There is an increasing need in today's society to monitor a subject's (e.g. customer's, patient's) real-time experience at a location (e.g. restaurant, hospital, hotel, car dealership, sports stadium or arena, gas station), and receive real-time feedback from such subjects, particularly as subjects engage and communicate more openly with mobile devices than with other subjects. Subjects frequently tend to avoid public conflicts and rarely provide negative feedback at the location in which their negative experience occurred. Owners, managers, and employees' understanding the real-time experiences of subjects in a closed system, and prior to subjects providing negative or neutral feedback to the public via conventional techniques, is becoming increasingly important. For example, when a family with children dines out at a restaurant, and a server happens to be inattentive at any point during their experience at the restaurant (e.g., after being seated and prior to taking drink and/or food orders, while waiting for food to be delivered and while drinks are being finished, after food has been delivered to see if anything else (e.g., condiments, silverware, etc.) is needed to enjoy the meal, while dinner is being eaten and drinks are being finished, once dinner is completed to inquire about whether any dessert or just the check is desired, after the check has been delivered, etc.), a parents' struggle to keep their children well-behaved for extended periods without food, drink, or something to occupy them, is exacerbated and leads to unpleasant, avoidable experiences. Indeed, these experiences are well within the restaurant's ability to rectify, but outside of both the parents', and the restaurant's supervisor's, ability to inconspicuously, simply, efficiently communicate a real-time experience issue with each other.

Various conventional techniques for a location receiving feedback from a subject as to their experience at the location exist and rely on mobile applications (e.g. Yelp®), or customer surveys/reviews/questionnaires physically provided to the user (e.g., left in a hotel room, accompanying the bill at a restaurant, etc.) or sent over e-mail, by text message, or on a website (e.g. a private business website, an aggregator website (e.g. Hotels.com®, TripAdvisor®, OpenTable®). For example, hospitals ask patients to fill out patient survey questionnaires as they are leaving the hospital. However, these conventional mobile application and customer survey techniques do not capture the real-time experience of the subject. Additionally, customer surveys/reviews/questionnaires often require the subject to answer multiple questions, which can be time consuming for a subject and result in annoyance or a subject not providing the valuable feedback at all. Such conventional techniques also require command of the English language and thus can be subject to misinterpretation by the customer, the location issuing the questionnaire, or both.

Individuals, businesses, and even government agencies' use of social media platforms (e.g. Twitter®, Facebook®) has also become ubiquitous. These conventional platforms permit subjects to publicly and widely communicate feedback about their experiences at locations in real-time. However, conventional mobile application, customer survey, and social media feedback techniques also do not provide the owners, managers, and/or employees at a location with a real-time and local monitoring mechanism to ensure that the subject is having a positive experience while the subject is still at the location. These conventional techniques are also ineffective at controlling subjects' dissemination of feedback on their respective experience to the general public prior to the subjects leaving the location and prior to the owners, managers, and/or employees at the location having a chance to improve the subjects' respective experiences in real-time and without public dissemination of negative feedback. The widespread dissemination of negative feedback via conventional techniques may rapidly damage the reputation of a location, and is costly, and both labor and time-intensive, to rectify and improve. These conventional techniques are also ineffective at permitting locations to rectify a subject's experience before they leave the location; rather, by the time the location is aware of a subject's negative experience, it is often too late to address in real-time. Conventional survey techniques demand the subject's resources (e.g., time, command of English (or any) language, effort, etc.) which can serve to annoy the subject even more, have the subject avoid providing this valuable feedback to the location directly, and/or increase the likelihood that the subject provides negative feedback on their own time, in a way most convenient to them, and to the general public.

The present disclosure is directed to a portable real-time experience communications device and a closed monitoring system that provides real-time, controlled, language-proof, inconspicuous, experience feedback information, in a subject-friendly manner, at any time during a subject's interaction at a location and prior to a subject leaving a location, and that avoids the location's receipt of untimely and public feedback, and necessity to perform costly, and labor and time-intensive, rectifications, that are associated with prior art feedback techniques.

SUMMARY

In some embodiments, a system for real-time user experience monitoring and response includes a plurality of portable communications devices and a centralized communications and display device. Each of the plurality of portable communications devices includes a plurality of actuators disposed on a surface of the respective portable device, each actuator configured to, when activated by a subject, generate an electronic signal indicating the activation of the respective actuator. Each of the plurality of portable communications devices may also include a processor and a non-transitory machine-readable storage medium encoded with program code executable by the processor for determining a time relative to the activation of the respective actuator and for generating an alert on the respective portable device in response to receiving the generated electronic signal. Each of the plurality of portable communications devices also includes a transmitter configured to transmit data over a network in response to receiving the generated electronic signal. The transmitted data includes an identifier of the respective activated actuator, an indicator of the determined time, and an identifier of the respective portable device.

In some embodiments, the centralized communications and display device includes a communications interface configured to be coupled to the network and to receive the respective transmitted data over the network from each of the transmitters of each of the portable devices. The centralized communications and display device also includes a processor coupled to the communications interface and a non-transitory machine-readable storage medium encoded with program code executable by the processor for generating respective machine-readable values indicative of one of a plurality of experience types for each of the portable device users using the received data at the communications interface and for generating an alert for a respective portable device user using the generated machine-readable values and if the indicated one experience type for the respective portable device user matches or exceeds a threshold experience type.

In some embodiments, a computer-implemented method for real-time monitoring and responding to user experiences at a location includes deploying a centralized communications and display node, and each of a plurality of portable communications devices with a respective subject of a plurality of subjects, within the location, and receiving, over a network, from one or more of the plurality of portable devices, and at the centralized communications and display node, transmitted data. In various embodiments, the transmitted data includes a respective identifier of one of a respective plurality of actuators disposed on the surface of each of the one or more portable devices and that was activated by the respective subject, a respective indicator of the activation time of the respective one actuator of each of the one or more portable devices, and a respective identifier of each of the one or more portable devices. In some embodiments, the computer-implemented method also includes generating, at the centralized communications and display node, respective machine-readable values indicative of either a positive experience type or a negative experience type for each of the actuator-activating subjects using the received data, and generating, at the centralized communications and display node, a respective alert for each of the actuator-activating subjects using the generated machine-readable values and if the indicated experience type for the respective actuator-activating subject is a negative experience type.

