From today's augmented houses to tomorrow's smart homes

Abstract

A considerable amount of research has been carried out towards making long-standing smart home visions technically feasible. The technologically augmented homes made possible by this work are starting to become reality, but thus far living in and interacting with such homes has introduced significant complexity while offering limited benefit. As these technologies are increasingly adopted, the knowledge we gain from their use suggests a need to revisit the opportunities and challenges they pose. Synthesizing a broad body of research on smart homes with observations of industry and experiences from our own empirical work, we provide a discussion of ongoing and emerging challenges, namely challenges for meaningful technologies, complex domestic spaces, and human-home collaboration. Within each of these three challenges we discuss our visions for future smart homes and identify promising directions for the field.

Bridging e-Health and the Internet of Things: The SPHERE Project

“…All these provide rich datasets of ADL but, even though the data are available and can be used in helping to identify behaviour profiles that reflect users' daily activities, they have been relatively underexplored and integrated as indicators of health and wellbeing. The major challenge in this space is system and data integration for different commercially available devices to support user-friendly configuration [12]. The datasets generated from those different SH systems are disaggregated or less-efficiently manipulated by advanced ML algorithms.…”

Sustainable and Smart: Rethinking What a Smart Home is

“…In addition to the manufacturer's view, the way that people think about and interact with smart homes must be taken into account [9]. A research study conducted by Eggen and colleagues [10] reveals a clear discrepancy between people's home experience and available technology, which contributes greatly to a lag in the wide deployment of smart housing systems.…”

Using Shape-Change to Express Dynamic Affordances of Intelligent Systems

“…Several studies, for example [2,5,6], suggest that users want to at least feel a degree of control over an intelligent system's decisions. One possible strategy is to communicate system reasoning to the user [7].…”

“…One possible strategy is to communicate system reasoning to the user [7]. However, a notable study [6] highlighted two challenges in improving users' mental models (understanding) of a system. First, users' knowledge and skills might be insufficient for understanding the complex reasoning of their machines.…”