3,160 research outputs found
Exploring The Responsibilities Of Single-Inhabitant Smart Homes With Use Cases
DOI: 10.3233/AIS-2010-0076This paper makes a number of contributions to the field of requirements analysis for Smart Homes. It introduces Use Cases as a tool for exploring the responsibilities of Smart Homes and it proposes a modification of the conventional Use Case structure to suit the particular requirements of Smart Homes. It presents a taxonomy of Smart-Home-related Use Cases with seven categories. It draws on those Use Cases as raw material for developing questions and conclusions about the design of Smart Homes for single elderly inhabitants, and it introduces the SHMUC repository, a web-based repository of Use Cases related to Smart Homes that anyone can exploit and to which anyone may contribute
Adaptive architecture: Regulating human building interaction
In this paper we explore regulatory, technical and interactional implications of Adaptive Architecture, a novel trend emerging in the built environment. We provide a comprehensive description of the emergence and history of the term, with reference to the current state of the art and policy foundations supporting it e.g. smart city initiatives and building regulations. As Adaptive Architecture is underpinned by the Internet of Things (IoT), we are interested in how regulatory and surveillance issues posed by the IoT manifest in buildings too. To support our analysis, we utilise a prominent concept from architecture, Stuart Brandâs Shearing Layers model, which describes the different physical layers of a building and how they relate to temporal change. To ground our analysis, we use three cases of Adaptive Architecture, namely an IoT device (Nest Smart Cam IQ); an Adaptive Architecture research prototype, (ExoBuilding); and a commercial deployment (the Edge). In bringing together Shearing Layers, Adaptive Architecture and the challenges therein, we frame our analysis under 5 key themes. These are guided by emerging information privacy and security regulations. We explore the issues Adaptive Architecture needs to face for: A â âPhysical & information securityâ; B â âEstablishing responsibilityâ; C â âoccupant rights over flows, collection, use & control of personal dataâ; D- âVisibility of Emotions and Bodiesâ; & E â âSurveillance of Everyday Routine Activitiesâ. We conclude by summarising key challenges for Adaptive Architecture, regulation and the future of human building interaction
Adaptive Architecture:Regulating human building interaction
In this paper, we explore the regulatory, technical and interactional implications of Adaptive Architecture (AA) and how it will recalibrate the nature of human-building interaction. We comprehensively unpack the emergence and history of this novel concept, reflecting on the current state of the art and policy foundations supporting it. As AA is underpinned by the Internet of Things (IoT), we consider how regulatory and surveillance issues posed by the IoT are manifesting in the built environment. In our analysis, we utilise a prominent architectural model, Stuart Brandâs Shearing Layers, to understand temporal change and informational flows across different physical layers of a building. We use three AA applications to situate our analysis, namely a smart IoT security camera; an AA research prototype; and an AA commercial deployment. Focusing on emerging information privacy and security regulations, particularly the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016, we examine AA from 5 perspectives: physical & information security risks; challenges of establishing responsibility; enabling occupant rights over flows, collection, use & control of personal data; addressing increased visibility of emotions and bodies; understanding surveillance of everyday routine activities. We conclude with key challenges for AA regulation and the future of humanâbuilding interaction
What Would You Ask to Your Home if It Were Intelligent? Exploring User Expectations about Next-Generation Homes
Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research is giving birth to a multitude of futuristic home scenarios and applications; however a clear discrepancy between current installations and research-level designs can be easily noticed. Whether this gap is due to the natural distance between research and engineered applications or to mismatching of needs and solutions remains to be understood. This paper discusses the results of a survey about user expectations with respect to intelligent homes. Starting from a very simple and open question about what users would ask to their intelligent homes, we derived user perceptions about what intelligent homes can do, and we analyzed to what extent current research solutions, as well as commercially available systems, address these emerging needs. Interestingly, most user concerns about smart homes involve comfort and household tasks and most of them can be currently addressed by existing commercial systems, or by suitable combinations of them. A clear trend emerges from the poll findings: the technical gap between user expectations and current solutions is actually narrower and easier to bridge than it may appear, but users perceive this gap as wide and limiting, thus requiring the AmI community to establish a more effective communication with final users, with an increased attention to real-world deploymen
Usable privacy and security in smart homes
Ubiquitous computing devices increasingly dominate our everyday lives, including our most private places: our homes. Homes that are equipped with interconnected, context-aware computing devices, are considered âsmartâ homes. To provide their functionality and features, these devices are typically equipped with sensors and, thus, are capable of collecting, storing, and processing sensitive user data, such as presence in the home. At the same time, these devices are prone to novel threats, making our homes vulnerable by opening them for attackers from outside, but also from within the home. For instance, remote attackers who digitally gain access to presence data can plan for physical burglary. Attackers who are physically present with access to devices could access associated (sensitive) user data and exploit it for further cyberattacks. As such, usersâ privacy and security are at risk in their homes. Even worse, many users are unaware of this and/or have limited means to take action. This raises the need to think about usable mechanisms that can support users in protecting their smart home setups. The design of such mechanisms, however, is challenging due to the variety and heterogeneity of devices available on the consumer market and the complex interplay of user roles within this context.
This thesis contributes to usable privacy and security research in the context of smart homes by a) understanding usersâ privacy perceptions and requirements for usable mechanisms and b) investigating concepts and prototypes for privacy and security mechanisms. Hereby, the focus is on two specific target groups, that are inhabitants and guests of smart homes. In particular, this thesis targets their awareness of potential privacy and security risks, enables them to take control over their personal privacy and security, and illustrates considerations for usable authentication mechanisms. This thesis provides valuable insights to help researchers and practitioners in designing and evaluating privacy and security mechanisms for future smart devices and homes, particularly targeting awareness, control, and authentication, as well as various roles.Computer und andere âintelligenteâ, vernetzte GerĂ€te sind allgegenwĂ€rtig und machen auch vor unserem privatesten Zufluchtsort keinen Halt: unserem Zuhause. Ein âintelligentes Heimâ verspricht viele Vorteile und nĂŒtzliche Funktionen. Um diese zu erfĂŒllen, sind die GerĂ€te mit diversen Sensoren ausgestattet â sie können also in unserem Zuhause sensitive Daten sammeln, speichern und verarbeiten (bspw. Anwesenheit). Gleichzeitig sind die GerĂ€te anfĂ€llig fĂŒr (neuartige) Cyberangriffe, gefĂ€hrden somit unser Zuhause und öffnen es fĂŒr potenzielle â interne sowie externe â Angreifer. Beispielsweise könnten Angreifer, die digital Zugriff auf sensitive Daten wie PrĂ€senz erhalten, einen physischen Ăberfall in Abwesenheit der Hausbewohner planen. Angreifer, die physischen Zugriff auf ein GerĂ€t erhalten, könnten auf assoziierte Daten und Accounts zugreifen und diese fĂŒr weitere Cyberangriffe ausnutzen. Damit werden die PrivatsphĂ€re und Sicherheit der Nutzenden in deren eigenem Zuhause gefĂ€hrdet. Erschwerend kommt hinzu, dass viele Nutzenden sich dessen nicht bewusst sind und/oder nur limitierte Möglichkeiten haben, effiziente GegenmaĂnahmen zu ergreifen. Dies macht es unabdingbar, ĂŒber benutzbare Mechanismen nachzudenken, die Nutzende beim Schutz ihres intelligenten Zuhauses unterstĂŒtzen. Die Umsetzung solcher Mechanismen ist allerdings eine groĂe Herausforderung. Das liegt unter anderem an der groĂen Vielfalt erhĂ€ltlicher GerĂ€te von verschiedensten Herstellern, was das Finden einer einheitlichen Lösung erschwert. DarĂŒber hinaus interagieren im Heimkontext meist mehrere Nutzende in verschieden Rollen (bspw. Bewohner und GĂ€ste), was die Gestaltung von Mechanismen zusĂ€tzlich erschwert.
Diese Doktorarbeit trĂ€gt dazu bei, benutzbare PrivatsphĂ€re- und Sicherheitsmechanismen im Kontext des âintelligenten Zuhausesâ zu entwickeln. Insbesondere werden a) die Wahrnehmung von PrivatsphĂ€re sowie Anforderungen an potenzielle Mechanismen untersucht, sowie b) Konzepte und Prototypen fĂŒr PrivatsphĂ€re- und Sicherheitsmechanismen vorgestellt. Der Fokus liegt hierbei auf zwei Zielgruppen, den Bewohnern sowie den GĂ€sten eines intelligenten Zuhauses. Insbesondere werden in dieser Arbeit deren Bewusstsein fĂŒr potenzielle PrivatsphĂ€re- und Sicherheits-Risiken adressiert, ihnen Kontrolle ĂŒber ihre persönliche PrivatsphĂ€re und Sicherheit ermöglicht, sowie Möglichkeiten fĂŒr benutzbare Authentifizierungsmechanismen fĂŒr beide Zielgruppen aufgezeigt. Die Ergebnisse dieser Doktorarbeit legen den Grundstein fĂŒr zukĂŒnftige Entwicklung und Evaluierung von benutzbaren PrivatsphĂ€re und Sicherheitsmechanismen im intelligenten Zuhause
The meaning of convenience in smart home imaginaries:tech industry insights
Smart home technology (SHT) is being promoted for the enhancement of occupantsâ convenience, as well as more efficient and sustainable energy consumption. However, recent research indicates that convenience often takes precedence over energy reduction, threatening to affect inhabitantsâ everyday practices in a non-sustainable way. In order to understand the social and environmental consequences of SHT, the meaning of convenience is investigated. How is the concept of convenience developed in concert with technological development? Presenting SHT imaginaries from the industry, the paper builds on qualitative interviews with 11 SHT professionals. By exploring the practices, roles, and relations at play in SHT development, it is demonstrated how the vision to enhance convenience in everyday life is related to a user imaginary characterized by passivity and disengagement from energy savings. Furthermore, convenience is enabled and enforced through the notion of interoperability. Interoperability refers to not only technologies âspeaking togetherâ but also a strong interdependency between professional actors. By exploring the practices at play in SHT development, the meaning of convenience is revealed to be an outcome of this interdependency as well as the collectively shaped ideas, and technological standards embedded in the industry. Policy relevance SHT is shaping our domestic futures, influencing material environments as well as social life and energy consumption. Currently, SHT is promoted and supported widely in policy. For instance, the European Commission stresses automation as a means to ensure the more efficient operation of buildings, generating cost and energy savings. However, a focus on convenience risks counteracting sustainability considerations. This study shows how convenience can take precedence across various branches of SHT development, with a consequence of creating passive users who are disengaged from sustainability issues. When policymakers promote the adoption of SHTs and automation of the built environment, a more critical stance is needed toward convenience in order to avoid user passivity and masked energy consumption. Policy instruments, such as the smart readiness indicator (SRI), should not only include calculations of what is technically possible in terms of automation but also examine the outcomes, practices, and behavior that SHT promotes
Domestic Photovoltaic Systems: The Governance of Inhabitant Practice in Low Carbon Housing Communities
Housing accounts for one-third of all CO2 emissions in the Western world, yet there is still limited understanding of why housing routinely uses more energy than predicted, resulting in a significant performance gap. Successful energy governance for housing is therefore crucial for cutting CO2 emissions and preventing catastrophic climate change. Addressing these challenges in the UK is largely shaped by developing âmore efficientâ domestic technologies, which assumes that inhabitants will use their technologies as intended. Conversely, this thesis examines the variation in the governance of Photovoltaic (PV) system provisioning processes and how this conditions inhabitantsâ practices â a key area overlooked in previous energy efficiency studies concerning PV systems.
This thesis focuses on empirical work drawing on three theories: Actor Network Theory (ANT), Practice theory, and Affordance that are brought in pragmatically as lenses to enable a more comprehensive examination and analysis of different aspects of the overall networks and practices and associated governance involved in a PV system.
The findings show that key provisioning actors understand the PV production process as a âblack boxâ, where the outputs are unquestioningly anticipated from the inputs. This results in an inappropriate governance network and integration between these actors when governing technology affordances and integration into homes. Opening up this provisioning âblack boxâ suggests two key approaches for developing appropriate energy governance networks and practices: identifying changes required within actorsâ agency and roles, and identifying changes required in the relationships between the actors in a contractual network. Both
changes require new actors to be involved in PV provisioning networks subject to wider networks and arrangements in the UK. The findings also show that good governance requires an examination of home technology practices in more detail, in their specific context, and taking inhabitantâs embodied competences and meanings into account, in order to properly anticipate how these designed technologies will operate in reality
Home as riskscape : exploring technology enabled care
Funding: Royal Society of Edinburgh (Grant Number(s): 62651); Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland (Grant Number(s): RIG008250).The growth and spread of ubiquitous smart technology to deliver public health outcomes at home, and its relationship with risk, urgently requires greater scholarly attention, not least given COVIDâ19. Theoretically informed by both critical geographies of home and risk scholarship, this paper uses data from interviews with professionals in Scotland designing and implementing technology enabled care (TEC) for current and future homes. It explores the organisation of risk in the context of TEC, and the importance of this in relation to home. Drawing on geographical writing on home, and the riskscape, I argue that the smart home is a contemporary manifestation of the riskscape with implications for ideas of intrusion and inequality, and the experience of home.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Strangers in the Room: Unpacking Perceptions of 'Smartness' and Related Ethical Concerns in the Home
The increasingly widespread use of 'smart' devices has raised multifarious
ethical concerns regarding their use in domestic spaces. Previous work
examining such ethical dimensions has typically either involved empirical
studies of concerns raised by specific devices and use contexts, or
alternatively expounded on abstract concepts like autonomy, privacy or trust in
relation to 'smart homes' in general. This paper attempts to bridge these
approaches by asking what features of smart devices users consider as rendering
them 'smart' and how these relate to ethical concerns. Through a multimethod
investigation including surveys with smart device users (n=120) and
semi-structured interviews (n=15), we identify and describe eight types of
smartness and explore how they engender a variety of ethical concerns including
privacy, autonomy, and disruption of the social order. We argue that this
middle ground, between concerns arising from particular devices and more
abstract ethical concepts, can better anticipate potential ethical concerns
regarding smart devices.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure. To appear in the Proceedings of the 2020 ACM
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '20
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