2017 14th International Symposium on Pervasive Systems, Algorithms and Networks & 2017 11th International Conference

on Frontier of Computer Science and Technology & 2017 Third International Symposium of Creative Computing

User Needs and Wishes in Smart Homes

What can Artificial Intelligence contribute?

Gottfried Zimmermann Tobias Ableitner Christophe Strobbe

Responsive Media Experience Responsive Media Experience Responsive Media Experience
Research Group Research Group Research Group
Stuttgart Media University Stuttgart Media University Stuttgart Media University
Stuttgart, Germany Stuttgart, Germany Stuttgart, Germany
gzimmermann@acm.org ableitner@hdm-stuttgart.de strobbe@hdm-stuttgart.de

Abstract—Smart homes are an application domain that is
inherently connected to explicit and implicit user interaction.
Following a user-centred design approach, we have to look at the
user's needs and preferences when designing systems and
components for smart homes. In this paper, we provide an
overview on what users in Germany want and wish from
technology in their homes, based on former studies. We focus on
older persons and persons with severe physical disabilities and
their needs, as identified by recent studies and our own work.
We specify possible contributions from Artificial Intelligence to
fulfil these needs and wishes in future smart home systems.
Keywords—barrier-free smart home; AI; user needs; older
users; users with physical disabilities
I. INTRODUCTION
A recent publication of the Agile Ageing Alliance [1]
draws an optimistic picture of the "neighbourhoods of the
future" and how smart homes and their surroundings will
support older people in staying safe, healthy and socially
connected. This vision includes, among others, robots for
providing care and preparing meals, exoskeletons as walking
aids, fall-detection floors that automatically call for help in
medical emergencies, active chairs with built-in pressure
management cushions and adjustable back and leg rests, and
smart fridges that automatically reorder food items. The smart
home system interacts with humans through smart mirrors,
head-mounted displays and speech interfaces. Obviously,
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is supposed to play an important
role in these future scenarios.
In Germany, the smart home market volume is currently
estimated at 1.3 billion Euro in 2017 [2]. This is relatively
small compared to the US (13.2 billion Euro) and China (1.9
billion Euro). However, in Europe, Germany has the largest
smart home market, sharply followed by the United Kingdom
(1.28 billion Euro).
While technology obviously bears a lot of potential to
change our living habits at home, the question arises whether
consumers actually need and want this change. After all, they
will only buy smart homes and smart home components if
they feel that they fulfil their needs and/or make their wishes
come true.
In this paper, we first look at what users say about their
needs and wishes with regard to smart homes, based on
literature and our own research with adults in Germany. In
chap. II, we focus on older adults, and in chap. III we look at
persons with severe physical disabilities. We hint at possible
applications of AI that have the potential to help to fulfil these
needs and wishes (chap. IV). Hereby, we want to contribute
to a research agenda for AI applications in the smart home
domain. We conclude this paper with a postulation for the
future of user acceptance on smart homes (chap. V).
II. OLDER PERSONS' NEEDS AND WISHES
According to a survey by Deloitte in 2015 [3], consumers
in Germany are most interested in smart home components
that provide comfort and security, and possibly energy
savings. This is reflected in the percentage of people who are
interested in alarm systems (38%), heating (34%), lighting
(32%), sound systems (31%), media servers (30%), connected
TVs (28%) and shutters/switches (28%). In comparison, only
30% of consumers stated that they are interested in assistance
systems for seniors. However, this is a relative high number
when considering that the respondents' ages were distributed
between 19 and 75 years.
In March 2017, we conducted an informal mini-survey
among 46 persons who attended a public presentation in
Stuttgart, addressing smart homes and their benefits for people
with disabilities and older people. The participants in the mini-
survey were mostly in the age of 50-80 (estimated). In
general, we observed a loathness to smart home technologies.
However, 42 persons (91%) expressed an interest in smart
homes if they help older people to live independently at home.
According to our experience, support for independent living is
the primary incentive for smart homes among seniors.
Secondary incentives are energy savings (21 persons = 46%)
and security (19 persons = 41%). See Fig. 1.

2375-527X/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE 454

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DOI 10.1109/ISPAN-FCST-ISCC.2017.66
 Fig. 3. Responses in our mini-survey to the question: "Would you like to
Fig. 1. Responses in our mini-survey to the question: "What makes a smart have a robot that helps you to do your domestic chores?"
home interesting for you?" (1) Comfort; (2) Security; (3) Independent living
when ageing; (4) Energy savings / environmental protection; (5) Joy of use.
Multiple answers were possible.
Being asked for the barriers for smart home technologies,
our respondents put privacy and data protection concerns in
Older people feel that living independently is a great asset, the first place (36 persons = 78%), followed by insufficient
that is, being able to live in their own homes rather than being maturity of the technology (30 persons = 65%). On the third
forced to move into a nursing home. In our mini-survey, when place for barriers are the price tag and low usability of smart
asked if they wanted a system that monitors their health status, home systems (15 persons = 33% each). See Fig. 4.
only 9 persons (25%) agreed. However, if they had to move
into a nursing home without such a system, the number of
persons wanting to have such a system increased to 34 (74%).
See Fig. 2.

Fig. 4. Responses in our mini-survey to the question: "What is a barrier for

using a smart home for you?" (1) Price tag; (2) Data protection and privacy;
(3) Difficult installation and operation; (4) Insufficient maturity level of
technology; (5) Other. Multiple answers were possible.

Fig. 2. Responses in our mini-survey to the questions: (1) "Would you like to The concern about privacy and data protection was also
have a system in your smart home to monitor your health status?" (2) "What if reflected in a lack of willingness to share the personal usage
you otherwise had to move into a nursing home?"
data of a smart home with people and organizations outside
Robots can help older persons to live independently at the home (see fig. 3). Only one person agreed, but 42 (91%)
home – since it is usually not feasible to have a human declined. See Fig. 5.
assistant 24 hours. In our mini-survey, 20 persons (43%)
indicated that they would like to have a care robot that helps
them to do their domestic chores. See Fig. 3.

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Fig. 5. Response in our mini-survey to the question: "Would you agree to
have your usage data leave your home?"
It should be noted that our mini-survey was not
representative, and therefore does not allow us to make
statistical inferences about the whole population of elderlies.
Nevertheless, it motivates us to think about how technology
could help to fulfil needs and wishes, and to mitigate concerns
that older people in Germany might have about smart home
technologies.
III. NEEDS AND WISHES OF PERSONS WITH SEVERE PHYSICAL
DISABILITIES
In 2016, we conducted a qualitative usability study on
barrier free smart homes [4]. The participants had differing
physical limitations resulting from quadriplegia or similar
physical disabilities. Five persons participated in an interview,
and four of them in the following user tests. The participants
were between 32 and 70 years old. The purpose of the
interview was to find out the participants' needs with regard to
smart homes. Based on the interview results, we developed a
prototypical smart home control app employing face tracking,
speech control and scanning. The prototype was then
qualitatively evaluated with usability tests. The study revealed
that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work for our
participants, and that a barrier-free smart home needs a highly
customizable user interface for control. This is a strong
motivation for us to develop and further evaluate user
interfaces in smart homes which adapt to individual user
needs, and support a variety of input methods.
Furthermore, we observed that our younger participants
were more open to new technologies in smart homes than the
older ones. In general, the participants had only little privacy
concerns even though a camera is used for face tracking, and
speech recognition runs on a server outside the smart home.
We observed that persons who depend on external assistance
in their daily lives (including such intimate things like
washing or going to the lavatory) were not much concerned
about privacy. We assume the following reasons: (1) They
already have less privacy in their lives; and (2) they can
benefit more from a smart home than persons with no
disabilities.
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IV. OPPORTUNITIES FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI has entered or will soon enter our daily lives in many
domains, claiming to make our lives more comfortable and
more secure. Some examples include automatic language
translation, autonomously driving cars, and artificial agents on
smartphones that listen to their users. We believe that AI can
make significant contributions towards fulfilling the needs and
wishes of older persons (see chap. II). At the same time, we
need to make sure that AI technologies respect and mitigate
the concerns of their users.
In the following, we address the most prevalent needs and
wishes from the mini-survey (see chap. II), and where we see
opportunities for AI to fulfil them. We also address the
primary concern, namely the concern about privacy and data
protection
A. Support in independent living
With its pattern recognition capabilities, AI can monitor a
person's health status and provide tips to the person, their
relatives and their care givers how to overcome a potential
health risk before it becomes a serious threat. In medical
emergency cases, a smart home system can automatically call
a doctor or an ambulance. The downside of this opportunity is
that AI needs a lot of data to be able to detect patterns of
irregular situations. These data may include sensors in the
home, including cameras and microphones. It may also
include body-worn sensors, e.g. fitness trackers that the person
needs to carry day and night.
Service robots have already been designed to assist
persons in their homes and in other places (e.g. the Care-O-bot
by Fraunhofer [5]). AI has an instrumental role in enabling
these robots to effectively do their jobs while interacting with
humans in a safe and natural way.
It is important for older people to stay engaged in their
physical and cognitive activities. AI can help to provide
incentives (gamification and serious games) for such
activities, and detect if capabilities are declining so that
appropriate counter-measures can be taken.
B. Energy savings & environmental protection
By tracking the behaviour of inhabitants over days and
weeks, AI can identify behaviour that wastes energy (e.g.
windows open in winter for half an hour). It can then suggest
ways to save energy (e.g. opening windows only for 2
minutes). In a fully automated smart home, AI could control
most energy-related events automatically, to minimize the
energy consumption over the day (e.g. opening the windows
when the outside temperature peaks).
Technology can provide an incentive for people to save
energy by providing detailed information on the energy usage,
and by applying methods of gamification (e.g. carbon
footprint competition within the family).
When using green technologies for electric power, smart
power grids are needed to balance the load. AI can contribute
to this by observing the power consumption patterns of
individual smart homes, and taking measures to steer their
momentary power consumption towards balancing the overall
power grid.
C. Ease of use for setup and operation
Adding components to a smart home and setting them up
in a secure way should be no effort for the user ("zero
configuration"). AI can help by providing default settings that
are tailored to a particular user, their preferences and the smart
home environment. AI can also engage in a natural dialog
with the user, acting as a setup assistant.
Speech is often deemed as the most natural way of human-
computer interaction since humans mostly communicate by
speech among each other. AI has made big strides on
interpreting human speech and generating human-like
utterances. However, more advances are necessary to
overcome existing weaknesses, e.g. lack of context. In our
tests with persons with quadriplegia and similar physical
disabilities we found out that speech recognition was difficult
to use for some of them due to a rather soft and unclear speech
in comparison to other persons. Note that quadriplegia can
affect the control of breathing and a disturbed breathing can
cause speech problems. AI could be employed to better
understand an unclear speech.
Users want to be in control of their smart homes, even
when intelligent technologies make automated decisions on
behalf of the user. It is a challenge for intelligent technologies
to always respect the user's will, but without pestering the user
with repetitious confirmation requests for pending decisions.
A similar challenge is how to switch on an advanced
interaction support system for persons with severe physical
disabilities. If the smart home is controlled by face tracking or
speech, it can be turned off with those input methods but not
turned on again without physical effort. We discussed this
problem with the participants of our usability study in 2016,
but did not find a satisfying solution. Therefore, bringing
disabled users in complete control of their smart home is a
topic for future work.
Personalization of user interfaces can help to overcome
usability and accessibility problems, in particular for people
whose visual, auditory and/or cognitive capabilities decrease
when ageing. In our 2016 study, we evaluated a number of
configurations of our prototype using a variety of button and
font sizes. By observing a user's activities, and by comparing
them with other users, AI can support match-making, i.e.
identify appropriate user interface settings for individual users
(e.g. font size, contrast, volume, captions, verbosity level,
simplification, timeouts) [6]. And as the user ages, AI can
make the user interface "grow older" with the user in a
synchronized manner.
D. Privacy and data protection
Smart homes will not become accepted by a large
population unless they respect the people's concerns about
privacy and data protection. Obviously, AI's capabilities are
often enabled by big data and limited by lack of data at the
same time.
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The individual user must be in control of what happens
with their data, for each service that they use. However, it is
usually overwhelming to read through long data usage
statements that differ from service to service. We propose
therefore that the user can create an individual "data sharing
policy" in which the user declares the level of sharing that
they admit for every data category (e.g. biometric data, house
heating data, movement data, etc.). When the user wants to
use a new service, they negotiate the service features and price
with the service provider, based on the user's data sharing
policy.
AI could provide consulting to the user in setting up their
individual data sharing policy, and in the negotiations with
service providers. It can also provide assurance to the user by
reporting about the usage of their data, and by alerting them if
their data has been used in unpredicted ways.
V. CONCLUSION
Older users are interested in how smart homes can make
their lives more independent and how they can help them to
save energy. Persons with quadriplegia and comparable
disabilities need a highly adaptable user interface and special
input methods such as face tracking and scanning. Smart
home systems should be easy to install and operate, and
respect the user's concerns about privacy and data protection.
AI provides opportunities to meet these needs and wishes
by intelligent technologies that interact with the user in a
natural and personalized manner. However, there is a tension
between AI's hunger for data and the some of the users'
concerns about privacy and data protection. This tension
could be overcome by individual "data sharing policies" of
users.
At the end, it is important that the user and their needs and
wishes are in the centre of the design process of smart home
systems, and throughout their operation.
Acknowledgment
This research has received funding from the European
Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2011)
under grant agreement n° 610510, Prosperity4All ("Ecosystem
infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and
PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders"). This publication
reflects only the authors' views and the European Union is not
liable for any use that may be made of the information
contained herein.
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