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Sensing Home: Participatory Exploration of Smart Sensors in the Home

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Part of the Internet of Things book series (ITTCC)

Abstract

More and more things in the home are sensor equipped and connected to an all encompassing Internet of Things (IoT). These »smart« things may offer novel ways to interact but also raise questions around their social implications. While participatory research on IoT for the smart city has shown that technically functioning IoT toolkits are valuable research tools, surprisingly few such toolkits exist for participatory research on the smart home. Thus, we have developed the toolkit »Sensing Home« to involve people into designing and understanding use and context of IoT in the home. We will report on the design, development, and subsequent field studies of Sensing Home. Three use cases will be presented, to discuss how Sensing Home enabled several modes of participatory exploration. The first use case reports on people developing custom sensor applications within their homes. The second use case describes how students appropriated Sensing Home for empirical in-the-wild studies of smart sensing in the home. For the third use case, Sensing Home was deployed in households to explore and to make sense of collected sensor data together with inhabitants.

Keywords

Internet of things IoT Smart home Networked sensing systems Sensor data Personal data Privacy In-the-wild User study 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant number FKZ 16SV7116.

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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Media Informatics, Technische Universität ChemnitzChemnitzGermany

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