Skip to main content

Understanding User Needs in Smart Homes and How to Fulfil Them

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
End-User Development (IS-EUD 2023)

Abstract

Smart homes are becoming a widespread reality given the increasingly available number of connected objects and sensors. However, it is still unclear what people expect from automations that are made possible by this technological evolution. In addition, it is unclear whether current trigger-action programming (TAP) languages offer sufficient operators and constructs to specify the desired automations. In this paper, we report on a study aiming to provide useful elements to address such issues. It involved 34 users without experience in IoT programming who created 204 desired home automations. We discuss an analysis of such results in terms of the relationships found between smart-home components and of the requirements for novel operators in TAP languages.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Allen, J.F.: Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals. Commun. ACM 26(11), 832–843 (1983)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Augusto, J.C., Chris, D.N.: The use of temporal reasoning and management of complex events in smart homes. In: ECAI, vol. 16, p. 778 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bak, N., Chang, B.M., Choi, K.:Smart block: a visual programming environment for smartthings. In: 2018 IEEE 42nd Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), vol. 2, pp. 32–37. IEEE (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Barricelli, B.R., Valtolina, S.: Designing for end-user development in the internet of things. In: Díaz, P., Pipek, V., Ardito, C., Jensen, C., Aedo, I., Boden, A. (eds.) IS-EUD 2015. LNCS, vol. 9083, pp. 9–24. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18425-8_2

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Brackenbury, W., et al.: How users interpret bugs in trigger-action programming. In: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article Paper 552, vol. 12 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.330078

  6. Breve, B., Cimino, G., Deufemia, V.: Identifying security and privacy violation rules in trigger-action IoT platforms with NLP models. IEEE Internet Things J. 10(6), 5607–5622 (2023)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Brich, J., Walch, M., Rietzler, M., Weber, M., Schaub, F.: Exploring end user programming needs in home automation. ACM Trans. Comput-Hum. Interact. (TOCHI) 24(2), 1–35 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Cabitza, F., Daniela, F., Rosa, L., Antonio, P.: Rule-based tools for the configuration of ambient intelligence systems: a comparative user study. Multimedia Tools Appl. 76, 5221–5241 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3511-2

  9. Chen, X., Xiaolu, Z., Michael, E., Xiaoyin, W., Feng, W.: Fix the leaking tap: a survey of trigger-action programming (tap) security issues, detection techniques and solutions. Comput. Secur. 120, 102812 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Corno, F., De Russis, L., Roffarello, A.M.: A high-level semantic approach to end-user development in the internet of things. Int. J. Hum Comput Stud. 125, 41–54 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Corno, F., De Russis, L., Roffarello, A.M.: Empowering end users in debugging trigger-action rules. In: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–13 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Corno, F., Luigi De, R., Alberto, M.R.: How do end-users program the internet of things?. Behav. Inf. Technol. 41(9), 1865–1887 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Demeure, A., Caffiau, S., Elias, E., Roux, C.: Building and using home automation systems: a field study. In: Díaz, P., Pipek, V., Ardito, C., Jensen, C., Aedo, I., Boden, A. (eds.) IS-EUD 2015. LNCS, vol. 9083, pp. 125–140. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18425-8_9

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Desolda, G., Ardito, C., Matera, M.: Empowering end users to customize their smart environments: model, composition paradigms, and domain-specific tools. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. (TOCHI) 24(2), 1–52 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Desolda, G., Greco, F., Guarnieri, F., Mariz, N., Zancanaro, M.: SENSATION: an authoring tool to support event–state paradigm in end-user development. In: Ardito, C., et al. (eds.) INTERACT 2021. LNCS, vol. 12933, pp. 373–382. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85616-8_22

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. Fogli, D., Matteo, P., Claudia, S.: Smart home control through unwitting trigger-action programming. In: Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Distributed Multimedia Systems (DMS), pp. 194–201 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Fogli, D., Peroni, M., Stefini, C.: ImAtHome: making trigger-action programming easy and fun. J. Vis. Lang. Comput. 42, 60–75 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Funk, M., Chen, L.-L., Yang, S.-W., Chen, Y.-K.: Addressing the need to capture scenarios, intentions and preferences: interactive intentional programming in the smart home. Int. J. Des. 12(1), 53–66 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Galton, A.: Eventualities. Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 25–58 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1016/S1574-6526(05)80004-5

  20. GitHub. https://github.com/andrematt/trigger_action_rules. Accessed 14 Apr 2023

  21. Gómez, R., Juan, C.A., Antony, G.: Testing an event specification language. In: SEKE, pp. 341–345 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Huang, J., Cakmak, M.: Supporting mental model accuracy in trigger-action programming. In: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiqui-tous Computing - UbiComp 2015, pp. 215–225. ACM Press, Osaka, Japan (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2750858.2805830

  23. Manca, M., Fabio, P., Carmen, S.: Remote monitoring of end-user creat-ed automations in field trials. J. Ambient Intell. Hum. Comput. 13, 1–29 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-021-03239-0

  24. Manca, M., Paternò, F., Santoro, C., Corcella, L.: Supporting end-user debugging of trigger-action rules for IoT applications. Int. J. Hum Comput Stud. 123, 56–69 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Mattioli, A., Paternò, F.: A visual environment for end-user creation of IoT customization rules with recommendation support. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, pp. 1–5 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Mi, X., Feng, Q., Ying, Z., XiaoFeng, W.: An empirical characterization of IFTTT: ecosystem, usage, and performance. In: Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 398–404 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Prange, S., Florian, A.: I wish you were smart (er): investigating users’ desires and needs towards home appliances. In: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–8 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Salovaara, A., Bellucci, A., Vianello, A., Jacucci, G.: Programmable smart home toolkits should better address households’ social needs. In: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Confer-ence on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–14 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Soares, D., Dias, J.P., Restivo, A., Ferreira, H.S.: Programming IoT-spaces: a user-survey on home automation rules. In: Paszynski, M., Kranzlmüller, D., Krzhizhanovskaya, V.V., Dongarra, J.J., Sloot, P.M.A. (eds.) ICCS 2021. LNCS, vol. 12745, pp. 512–525. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77970-2_39

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  30. Statista, Number of IoT connected devices worldwide 2019–2021 with forecasts to 2030. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1183457/iot-connected-devices-worldwide/. Accessed 12 Apr 2023

  31. Terrier, L., Alexandre, D., Sybille, C.: Ccbl: a language for better supporting context centered programming in the smart home. In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, no. EICS, pp. 1–18 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Ur, B., McManus, E., Pak Yong Ho, M., Littman, M.L.:Practical trig-ger-action programming in the smart home. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, pp. 803–812 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Ur, B., et al.: Trigger-action programming in the wild: an analysis of 200,000 ifttt recipes. In: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Hu-man Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 3227–3231 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Yu, H., Jie, H., Christine, J.: Analysis of ifttt recipes to study how humans use internet-of-things (iot) devices. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Em-bedded Networked Sensor Systems, pp. 537–541 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Zancanaro, M., Gallitto, G., Dina, Y., Treccani B.: Improving mental models in IoT end-user development. Hum.-Centric Comput. Inf. Sci. 2, 48 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Zhao, V., Lefan, Z., Bo, W., Shan, L., Blasé, U.: Visualizing differences to improve end-user understanding of trigger-action programs. In: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–10 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the PRIN 2017 “EMPATHY: Empowering People in Dealing with Internet of Things Ecosystems”, https://www.empathy-project.eu/.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrea Mattioli .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Mattioli, A., Paternò, F. (2023). Understanding User Needs in Smart Homes and How to Fulfil Them. In: Spano, L.D., Schmidt, A., Santoro, C., Stumpf, S. (eds) End-User Development. IS-EUD 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13917. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34433-6_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34433-6_8

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-34432-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-34433-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics