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Smart home technologies are making their way into families. Parents' and children's shared use of smart home technologies has received growing attention in CSCW and related research communities. Families and children are also frequently featured as target audiences in smart home product marketing. However, there is limited knowledge of how exactly children and family interactions are portrayed in smart home product marketing, and to what extent those portrayals align with the actual consideration of children and families in product features and resources for child safety and privacy. We conducted a content analysis of product websites and online resources of 102 smart home products, as these materials constitute a main marketing channel and information source about products for consumers. We found that despite featuring children in smart home marketing, most analyzed product websites did not mention child safety features and lacked sufficient information on how children's data is collected and used. Specifically, our findings highlight misalignments in three aspects: (1) children are depicted as users of smart home products but there are insufficient child-friendly product features; (2) harmonious child-product co-presence is portrayed but potential child safety issues are neglected; and (3) children are shown as the subject of monitoring and datafication but there is limited information on child data collection and use. We discuss how parent-child relationships and parenting may be negatively impacted by such marketing depictions, and we provide design and policy recommendations for better incorporating child safety and privacy considerations into smart home products.
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The Lived Experience of Child-Owned Wearables: Comparing Children's and Parents’ Perspectives on Activity Tracking
Children are increasingly using wearables with physical activity tracking features. Although research has designed and evaluated novel features for supporting parent-child collaboration with these wearables, less is known about how families naturally adopt and use these technologies in their everyday life. We conducted interviews with 17 families who have naturally adopted child-owned wearables to understand how they use wearables individually and collaboratively. Parents are primarily motivated to use child-owned wearables for children's long-term health and wellbeing, whereas children mostly seek out entertainment and feeling accomplished through reaching goals. Children are often unable to interpret or contextualize the measures that wearables record, while parents do not regularly track these measures and focus on deviations from their children's routines. We discuss opportunities for making naturally-occurring family moments educational to positively contribute to children's conceptual understanding of health, such as developing age-appropriate trackable metrics for shared goal-setting and data reflection.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1850389
- PAR ID:
- 10252705
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 12
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445376
