Smart homes and their users: a systematic analysis and key challenges

Abstract

Published research on smart homes and their users is growing exponentially, yet a clear understanding of who these users are and how they might use smart home technologies is missing from a field being overwhelmingly pushed by technology developers. Through a systematic analysis of peer-reviewed literature on smart homes and their users, this paper takes stock of the dominant research themes and the linkages and disconnects between them. Key findings within each of nine themes are analysed, grouped into three: (1) views of the smart home-functional, instrumental, socio-technical; (2) users and the use of the smart home-prospective users, interactions and decisions, using technologies in the home; and (3) challenges for realising the smart home-hardware and software, design, domestication. These themes are integrated into an organising framework for future research that identifies the presence or absence of cross-cutting relationships between different understandings of smart homes and their users. The usefulness of the organising framework is illustrated in relation to two major concernsprivacy and control-that have been narrowly interpreted to date, precluding deeper insights and potential solutions. Future research on smart homes and their users can benefit by exploring and developing cross-cutting relationships between the research themes identified.

Smart technology in the home: time for more clarity

“…Smart home-testing procedures typically try to capture the 'user experience' in laboratories or single-occupant apartments, missing out on the complexities of home life where practices are shared and negotiated between residents and their visitors, often with differing priorities (Wilson et al, 2015). There are now a few studies of smart home use 'in the wild', offering welcome insights into how people have not only adopted but also adapted technology to meet their needs, over relatively short periods of time (e.g.…”

“…Yet most research into household interactions with electricity networks is conducted from a fairly limited technical or economic standpoint, with only a small body of work on meanings, household dynamics and activities, and customer-utility relations (e.g. Gram-Hanssen & Darby, 2016;Nyborg & Røpke, 2013;Wilson, Hargreaves, & Hauxwell-Baldwin, 2015). And although end-use efficiency, absolute demand and system efficiency are all important considerations when assessing the place of homes in energy systems and their environmental impact, there is very little evaluation of the first two and only partial evaluations of the third.…”

Adjustable Green Defaults Can Help Make Smart Homes More Sustainable

“…Hence, a goal of green defaults for smart home technologies is to learn optimal settings for individual occupants, removing the need for the occupants themselves to repeatedly adjust. This is a multi-agent challenge, as one household's preferred setting may not be the same as another household's, and within a given household, multiple occupants may have different preferences [54][55][56]. Furthermore, occupant preferences can change over time, and there may be differences between what occupants thought they wanted before installation, and what functionality actually works in practice [54].…”

Ethical Dimensions of User Centric Regulation

“…Research on smart homes, for example, shows user interests are often side-lined for the desire to engineer the technical vision of contextually relevant, responsive devices and services to make life simpler and more convenient (Wilson, Hargreaves, & Hauxwell-Baldwin, 2015).…”