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Smart Devices Require Skilled UsersSummary article
The benefits obtained from home automation are promising and will become more pronounced as smart home technologies continue to develop. To achieve benefits, users require operational, data, and strategic skills to control and automate smart devices, retrieve and understand collected data, and make informed decisions. These skills were tested by providing assignments in a virtual test environment to 100 Dutch adult participants. The assignments were designed to measure different facets of all skills by using the functions, data, and automations of smart home devices. The results suggest that the Dutch adult population is not sufficiently skilled in using the smart home to its full potential; several skills related problems occurred in the tests. Furthermore, in terms of gender, age, and education, home automation further reinforces existing social-digital inequalities. Thus, earlier digital inequalities will remain present for some time, despite increasing device autonomy.
Main findings
Digital inequalities have emerged as a growing concern in modern societies. These inequalities relate to disparities in use of digital resources, including smart homes. The benefits obtained from home automation are promising and will become more pronounced as smart home technologies continue to develop. To achieve the benefits, users require skills to control and automate smart devices, retrieve and understand collected data, and make informed decisions. In terms of the first research question, the results suggest that the Dutch adult population is not sufficiently skilled in using the smart home to its full potential. The performance on operational skills to operate buttons and configure, ie, connect and control, smart home devices, and on the skills to retrieve data gathered by these devices resulted in relatively few problems. This finding might lead some to conclude that home automation will simplify the lives of many, especially because devices make autonomous decisions that reduce the number of decision points where skills are applied. However, using smart home automation is deceptively easy: the participants in our study (consciously and unconsciously) experienced many problems concerning the configuration of devices and the interpretation of infographics. Most problematic are strategic skills, specifically for applying settings and using data in a goal-oriented manner. When constructing rules to set up automations, people experienced problems with selecting triggers to initiate actions and with selecting desired actions. This might partly explain why users’ home automation practices rarely translate into pro environmental behavior change (Snow et al., 2013). Users of smart thermostats, for example, do not fully use the thermostats’ potential because they are unable to set up and use advanced functions, such as automatic adjustment of heating patterns (eg, through GPS or motion sensors) (Ponce et al.,2019). In contrast, underdeveloped skills might lead to increased energy consumption due to inappropriate application of prewarming rooms or simply due to the inefficient adoption of energy-consuming smart home devices (Hargreaves et al., 2018). Therefore, skill-related problems might result in negative implications (eg, unnecessary energy costs) and might limit future home automation (upgrades).digital dividedigital ieualitydigital skilsIoTsmart homeRead more
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