Home automation in the wild

TLDR

Smart home technologies have attracted research interest for decades, yet widespread adoption remains limited. The study aimed to understand why home automation has not been widely adopted by conducting semi‑structured visits to 14 households equipped with such systems. The authors performed semi‑structured home visits to 14 households with home automation. The study identified four barriers—high cost, inflexibility, poor manageability, and security challenges—that hinder broader adoption, and suggested research directions such as eliminating structural changes, providing simple security primitives, and enabling device composition.

Abstract

Visions of smart homes have long caught the attention of researchers and considerable effort has been put toward enabling home automation. However, these technologies have not been widely adopted despite being available for over three decades. To gain insight into this state of affairs, we conducted semi-structured home visits to 14 households with home automation. The long term experience, both positive and negative, of the households we interviewed illustrates four barriers that need to be addressed before home automation becomes amenable to broader adoption. These barriers are high cost of ownership, inflexibility, poor manageability, and difficulty achieving security. Our findings also provide several directions for further research, which include eliminating the need for structural changes for installing home automation, providing users with simple security primitives that they can confidently configure, and enabling composition of home devices.