When Your Living Space Knows What You Do: Acceptance of Medical Home Monitoring by Different Technologies

Smart home technologies that support independent living: challenges and opportunities for the building industry – a systematic mapping study

“…In reality, it is difficult to design a universal system that fits all possible users Bekiaris, Mourouzis and Maglaveras 2011;Casas et al 2008;Ziefle et al 2011). Gesture variations between Chinese and German people have been underlined by Anastasiou, Jian, and Stahl (2013), while Mahoney et al (2007) highlighted unexpected variations in the English language between Ireland and England that would induce deep misunderstanding in the users.…”

“…Aesthetics is scarcely mentioned in articles. Bitterman (2011) assessed its importance, especially with respect to increased user acceptance, whereas Ziefle, Himmel, and Wilkowska (2011) observed that the respondents to their survey evaluated the aesthetics/design of future medical technologies in smart homes as 'not so important' (28%) or 'unimportant' (25%). …”

“…However, very few articles investigated the users' acceptance in relation to the building environment. Among the few, Ziefle et al (2011) studied users' acceptance with respect to the room type (acceptance is highest in the living room, and lowest in the bathroom) and to the technology (most disliked technologies are camera-based systems, followed by positioning systems and the microphone). They also isolated a significant interacting effect of room type and technology.…”

Wearables or infrastructure

“…By taking on this assumption, we leveraged the expectation that video capture in the living space would be more acceptable to participants than in other locations in the home, as research suggests that video is a highly invasive technology and also that the living room is the space where monitoring technology is most acceptable [6]. However, some potential participants had to be turned down, as they did not have a TV in their lounge and watched media in a highly distributed way.…”

“…However these have methodological concerns that could be ameliorated by the development of approaches that capture additional forms of data [1,4]. Both of the methods discussed in this paper primarily focus on visual data capture in the home, which due to its richness can be considered particularly sensitive [6]. Study participants are also likely to have pre-existing understandings and positions towards video surveillance, particularly given the rise of reality TV and 'fly-on the-wall' documentaries [3].…”