What Users Want from Smart Environments

A large body of research has addressed many issues in smart environments, but few have taken a user-centric approach. We believe that one of the main reasons that smart environments are still largely unrealized is because research is technology-centric, with inadequate focus on users. Because everyone will use smart environments, it is important to study a variety of potential users. To help bridge the gap between what is and what could be, we set out to study users and find out how they feel about smart environments; for example, what users desire, their current capabilities, and their mental model for the behavior of these systems. To explore these issues we performed a survey on smart homes, a tangible embodiment of smart environments. The survey was online for 10 days recently, during which time we received 64 completed responses. Our results indicate that users want three things from smart homes: high-level abstractions, iterative deployments, and interoperability. In this paper we describe the survey method, summarize participants’ responses, and discuss the implications the results have on research into smart environments.