skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


  • NSF Public Access
  • Search Results
  • "I... caught a person casing my house... and scared him off:" The Use of Security-Focused Smart Home Devices by People with Disabilities
Title: "I... caught a person casing my house... and scared him off:" The Use of Security-Focused Smart Home Devices by People with Disabilities
Recent years have seen a proliferation of security-focused smart home devices (SSHDs). SSHDs, such as smart locks and cameras, are designed to accomplish critical tasks, such as protecting one’s home and property. However, their use by and for people with disabilities (PwD) has not been broadly investigated. To explore the state of SSHD use by PwD, we collected 114,871 amazon.com reviews for popular SSHDs and created a data set of reviews pertaining to PwD. We performed a broad analysis of the reviews in this data set and found that the presence of SSHDs empowered PwD to secure their domiciles independently. Further, caregivers used SSHDs to monitor PwD, ostensibly for the latter’s safety, albeit without explicit consent. Moreover, we also found that SSHDs have several drawbacks that impose various barriers of use on PwD. We analyze the significance of these findings and suggest five future research opportunities for SSHD design.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1947022
PAR ID:
10440882
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 16
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
    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. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; (, HAI '21: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction)
    How are people using current smart home technologies, and how do they conceptualize future ones that are more interconnected and more capable than those available today? We deployed an online survey study to 150 participants to investigate use of and opinions about smart speakers, home robots, virtual assistants, and other smart home devices.We also gauged how impressions of connected smart home devices are shaped by the way the devices interact with one another. Through a mixed-methods qualitative and quantitative approach, we found that people mostly use single devices for single functions, and have simple and brief interactions with virtual assistants. However, they imagine their future devices to have more control over the physical environment (i.e., interact with each other) and envision them interacting with people in more socially complex ways. These findings motivate design considerations and research directions for connected smart home technologies. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; (, ACM)
    Smart-home devices have become integral to daily routines, but their onboarding procedures - setting up a newly acquired smart device into operational mode - remain understudied. The heterogeneity of smart-home devices and their onboarding procedure can easily overwhelm users when they scale up their smart-home system. While Matter, the new IoT standard, aims to unify the smart-home ecosystem, it is still evolving, resulting in mixed compliance among devices. In this paper, we study the complexity of device onboarding from users' perspectives. We thus performed cognitive walkthroughs on 12 commercially available smart-home devices, documenting the commonality and distinctions of the onboarding process across these devices. We found that onboarding smart home devices can often be tedious and confusing. Users must devote significant time to creating an account, searching for the target device, and providing Wi-Fi credentials for each device they install. Matter-compatible devices are supposedly easier to manage, as they can be registered through one single hub independent of the vendor. Unfortunately, we found such a statement is not always true. Some devices still need their own companion apps and accounts to fully function. Based on our observations, we give recommendations about how to support a more user-friendly onboarding process. 
    more » « less
  4. (, AHFE International)
    Today, various sensor technologies have been introduced to help people keep track of their daily living activities. For example, a wide range of sensors were integrated in applications to develop a smart home, a mobile emergency response system and a fall detection system. Sensor technologies were also employed in clinical settings for monitoring an early sign or onset of Alzheimer’s diseases, dementia, abnormal sleep disorder, and heart rate problems. However, there has been a lack of attention paid to comprehensive reviews, valuable especially for young, early-career scholars who just developed research interests in this area. This paper reviewed the existing sensor technologies by considering various contexts such as sensor features, data of interests, locations of sensors, and the number of sensors. For instance, sensor technologies provided various features that enabled people to monitor biomechanics of human movement (e.g., walking speed), use of household goods (e.g., switch on/off of home appliances), sounds (e.g., sounds in a particular room), and surrounding environments (e.g., temperature and humidity). Sensor technologies were widely used to examine various data, such as biomarkers for health, dietary habits, leisure activities, and hygiene status. Sensors were installed in various locations to cover wide-open area (e.g., ceilings, wall, and hallway), specific area (e.g., a bedroom and a dining room), and specific objects (e.g., mattresses and windows). Different sets of sensors were employed to keep track of activities of daily living, which ranged from a single sensor to multiple sensors to cover throughout the home. This comprehensive reviews for sensor technology implementations are anticipated to help many researchers and professionals to design, develop, and use sensor technology applications adequately in the target user’s contexts by promoting safety, usability, and accessibility. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; (, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies)
    Jansen, Rob; Shafiq, Zubair (Ed.)
    Current privacy protections for smart home devices rarely consider bystanders' privacy, whose preferences are varied and may differ from primary users. We use Contextual Integrity theory to explore context-dependent variation in privacy norms regarding smart home bystanders’ data. We conducted a vignette-based survey with 761 participants in the US, varying parameter values to capture acceptability judgments regarding bystander information flows in certain situations: domestic work, shared housing, visiting a friend overnight, and Airbnb. We found that recipients and purposes of sharing impact acceptance the most. Sharing interaction logs was more acceptable than audio or video. Sharing smart speaker data was less acceptable than smart camera or smart door lock data. We found nuanced interaction effects between factors in different smart home situations, and differences between protections most favored by participants playing bystander vs. owner roles. We provide design and policy recommendations for smart home privacy protections that consider bystanders' needs. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email