A Cellular Telephone-Based Application for Skin-Grading to Support Cosmetic Sales

door-to-door sales of cosmetics based on a system called Skin-Expert, a skin-image grading service that includes analysis and diagnosis. Skin-Expert analyzes a customer’s current skin quality from a picture of the skin. Several parameters are extracted by image processing, and the skin grading is done by rules generated by data mining from a baseline of grades given by human skin-care experts. Communication with the Skin-Expert is through a cellular telephone with a camera, using e-mail software and a Web browser. Salespeople photograph the customer’s skin using the camera in a standard cellular telephone and then send an e-mail message that includes the picture as an attachment to our analysis system. Other parameters associated with the customer (for example, age and gender) are included in the body of the message. The picture is analyzed by our skin-grading system, and the results are made available as a page in HTML format on a customer-accessible Web site. An e-mail is sent when the results are available, usually within minutes. Salespeople check the results by using a Web browser on their cellular telephones. The output not only provides a grading result but also gives recommendations for the care and cosmetics that are most suitable for the customer. Our system integrates cellular communication, Web technology, computer analysis, data mining, and an expert system. Though salespeople use only a cellular telephone with very little computing power as the front end, they can take advantage of intelligent services such as computer grading and data mining. The salespeople do not need to think about what is running in the background, and there is no requirement that end users have any special hardware. Door-to-door sales is one of the most popular sales strategies in Japan. Salespeople visit a customer’s home, promote new products, and help the customer select suitable products through face-to-face communication. We can regard this strategy as one of customer-relationship management (CRM) (Goldenberg 2002). CRM is not the productoriented concept of “good products can be sold well” but the customer-oriented concept of “only products that a customer desires can be sold.” The most important point of CRM is to maintain good customers, and the periodic communication door-to-door salespeople have with customers is an effective way for a company to do this. However, door-to-door sales volume is decreasing because of the many online shops from which one can get detailed product information without talking with salespeople. The target users for our system are associated with cosmetics companies. Basically, cosmetics companies have failed to keep up with information technology (IT), so we designed a doorto-door sales-support system that helps salespeople by employing IT and AI technologies. This sales-support system is a CRM tool for door-to-door sales of cosmetics based on SkinExpert, a skin-image grading system that provides analysis, diagnosis, and recommendations. Skin-Expert analyzes the current grade (quality) of a customer’s skin from a picture of the skin. Several parameters are extracted by image processing, and the skin grading is done by rules generated through data mining from a Articles