A Consumer-Centric Framework for Measuring Product Obsolescence Using User-Generated Content and Large Language Models: Evidence From IoT Devices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Identifying product obsolescence factors is essential for guiding sustainable design and extending product longevity. Unlike prior studies, this research leverages online consumer reviews to explore product obsolescence factors. First, ChatGPT-4o, an advanced pre-trained large language model (LLM), is utilized to identify these factors. User-generated content (UGC) time series-based product obsolescence indexes are then defined to quantify each factor's impact, offering a UGC-based complement to earlier methods that depended on expert judgment, supplier input, or survey data. By leveraging real-time customer insights, this approach aligns with Industry 4.0 principles, offering a UGC-based method that can support engineering managers to proactively address product obsolescence. It integrates factors' relative importance, determined through frequency–analytic hierarchy process (Freq-AHP), with their severity impact on consumers, assessed using the Robustly optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers approach (RoBERTa). This is further supported by a robustness check, where small perturbations were applied to sentiment intensities and all indices recalculated, confirming the aggregated obsolescence index remained stable across all product categories. This study focuses on consumer IoT devices, an area underexplored in existing literature, analyzing 47,695 online consumer reviews across nine product categories and selecting 4,771 online obsolescence-related reviews for detailed analysis. Findings reveal nineteen key factors and demonstrate a fundamental shift in obsolescence, indicating that product obsolescence of consumer IoT devices is increasingly driven by adaptability, interoperability, and digital resilience rather than physical durability. These insights demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach to inform product obsolescence mitigation strategies and guide more resilient, user-centered design in IoT ecosystems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".