Smart homes and their users: a systematic analysis and key challenges

Published research on smart homes and their users is growing exponentially, yet a clear understanding of who these users are and how they might use smart home technologies is missing from a field being overwhelmingly pushed by technology developers. Through a systematic analysis of peer-reviewed literature on smart homes and their users, this paper takes stock of the dominant research themes and the linkages and disconnects between them. Key findings within each of nine themes are analysed, grouped into three: (1) views of the smart home—functional, instrumental, socio-technical; (2) users and the use of the smart home—prospective users, interactions and decisions, using technologies in the home; and (3) challenges for realising the smart home—hardware and software, design, domestication. These themes are integrated into an organising framework for future research that identifies the presence or absence of cross-cutting relationships between different understandings of smart homes and their users. The usefulness of the organising framework is illustrated in relation to two major concerns—privacy and control—that have been narrowly interpreted to date, precluding deeper insights and potential solutions. Future research on smart homes and their users can benefit by exploring and developing cross-cutting relationships between the research themes identified.     

Learning to live in a smart home

ABSTRACT

Smart homes promise to significantly enhance domestic comfort, convenience, security and leisure whilst simultaneously reducing energy use through optimized home energy management. Their ability to achieve these multiple aims rests fundamentally on how they are used by householders, yet very little is currently known about this topic. The few studies that have explored the use of smart homes have tended to focus on special-interest groups and be quite short-term. This paper reports on new in-depth qualitative data that explore the domestication of a range of smart home technologies in 10 households participating in a nine-month field trial. Four core themes emerge: (1) smart home technologies are both technically and socially disruptive; (2) smart homes require forms of adaptation and familiarization from householders that can limit their use; (3) learning to use smart home technologies is a demanding and time-consuming task for which there is currently very little support available; and (4) there is little evidence that smart home technologies will generate substantial energy savings and, indeed, there is a risk that they may generate forms of energy intensification. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for policy, design and further research.     

Product development, innovation networks, infrastructure and agglomeration economies

The continuos inflow of new products is a fundamental condition for a well-functioning market economy. It has been argued that new products are the outcome of a process which is based upon the principle “novelty by combination”. This characterization applies well to the type of product development analyzed in this paper, which comprises the development of new products and the renewal of old products in the Swedish engineering industry through the adoption of a specific type of innovation, namely the incorporation of information technology based components and their pertinent software, i.e. microelectronics. According to the theoretical perspective presented in the paper, a new or a renewed product may result from “random collisions” or from a cautious matching between technical opportunities and customer needs. A necessary condition for such “collisions” or matching to occur is communication and, hence, communication in innovation networks is one key factor in product development. The empirical part of the paper contains an empirical test of the role of establishment characteristics, innovation networks, infrastructure endowment and agglomeration economies for the first use of micro-electronics in product development at the plant level. The empirical results seem to confirm the importance of innovation networks as well as of infrastructure endowment and agglomeration economies for an early use of micro-electronics in product development. Received: October 1994 / Accepted in revised form: November 1996     

Relationships among interpersonal conflict, requirements uncertainty, and software project performance

Interpersonal conflict and user requirements uncertainty are pervasive phenomena that plague information systems projects. Relevant literature indicates that interpersonal conflicts can negatively affect information system (IS) projects, even after controlling for the effects of conflict management and resolution. However, the negative emotional characteristics of conflict alone have limited explanatory power with regard to IS project success. The purpose of this study is to provide additional insights into this phenomenon by examining the impact on IS project performance made by the interaction between interpersonal conflict and requirement uncertainty (which comprises both diversity and instability). The authors surveyed the top 1600 companies in Taiwan and the results revealed that requirements instability would lead to potential interpersonal conflict and interpersonal conflict was directly associated with requirements diversity which, in turn, was negatively associated with final project performance.     

Scalable arrays of chemical vapor sensors based on DNA-decorated graphene

Arrays of chemical vapor sensors based on graphene field effect transistors functionalized with single-stranded DNA have been demonstrated. Standard photolithographic processing was adapted for use on large-area graphene by including a metal protection layer, which protected the graphene from contamination and enabled fabrication of high quality field-effect transistors （GFETs）. Processed graphene devices had hole mobilities of 1,640 ± 250 cm2.V-1.s-1 and Dirac voltages of 15 ± 10 V under ambient conditions. Atomic force microscopy was used to verify that the graphene surface remained uncontaminated and therefore suitable for controlled chemical functionalization. Single-stranded DNA was chosen as the functionalization layer due to its affinity to a wide range of target molecules and π-π stacking interaction with graphene, which led to minimal degradation of device characteristics. The resulting sensor arrays showed analyte- and DNA sequence-dependent responses down to parts-per-billion concentrations. DNA/GFET sensors were able to differentiate among chemically similar analytes, including a series of carboxylic acids, and structural isomers of carboxylic acids and pinene. Evidence for the important role of electrostatic chemical gating was provided by the observation of understandable differences in the sensor response to two compounds that differed only by the replacement of a （deprotonating） hydroxyl group by a neutral methyl group. Finally, target analytes were detected without loss of sensitivity in a large background of a chemically similar, volatile compound. These results motivate further development of the DNA/graphene sensor family for use in an electronic olfaction system.     

High-speed cornering by CNC machines under prescribed bounds on axis accelerations and toolpath contour error

To exactly execute a sharp corner in the toolpath, the feedrate of a CNC machine must instantaneously drop to zero at that point. This constraint is problematic in the context of high-speed machining, since it incurs very high deceleration/acceleration rates near sharp corners, which increase the total machining time, and may incur significant path deviations (contour errors) at these points. A strategy for negotiating sharp corners in high-speed machining is proposed herein, based upon a priori toolpath/feedrate modifications in their vicinity. Each corner is smoothed by replacing a subset of the path that contains it with a conic “splice” segment, deviating from the exact corner by no more than a prescribed tolerance ?, along which the square of the feedrate is specified as a Bernstein-form polynomial. The problem of determining the fastest traversal of the conic segments under known axis acceleration bounds can then be formulated as a constrained optimization problem, and by exploiting some well-known properties of Bernstein-form polynomials this can be approximated by a simple linear programming task. Some computed examples are presented to illustrate the implementation and performance of the high-speed cornering strategy.