Tushar M. Jois (City College of New York), Susan Landau (Tufts University)
Mass adoption of home IoT devices has been slower than expected, and numerous user studies have looked at issues consumers have regarding the use of these devices. But despite multiple studies on user concerns around the world regarding characteristics sought in home IoT devices, two important aspects have largely been missing. The first is the wide variety of housing types. Almost all user studies studying desired characteristics of home IoT devices have focused on the single-family stand-alone home environment. Wide adoption of home IoT devices, however, will mean use in a variety of living situations: rental apartments, condominiums, retirement communities, dormitories, and others. This introduces new complexities, including the second largely ignored issue. In these other types of housing situations, multiple other players are involved in the deployment of home IoT devices, including builders, landlords, housing managers, government regulators, and more. Getting home IoT devices right includes factoring in the characteristics that these other players desire and expect. This will be particularly critical in standardization efforts for home IoT.
Previous work has shown that home IoT devices must satisfy obvious requirements of security, privacy, and interoperability – and less obvious ones of reliability, safety, data portability, usability, and controllability. Our work extends this list in in two important ways. First, by broadening the literature review to other previously ignored but highly relevant fields, including human-building interaction, we collect all previously studied characteristics relevant to home IoT. Second, we provide precise definitions of each; as a result of the analysis involved, we introduce new characteristics not previously considered by the computer science community. Our research in delineating required characteristics of home IoT provides a crucial building block for standardizing home IoT devices.