Home Automation in the Wild: Challenges and Opportunities

1. Home Automation in the Wild:Challenges and Opportunities A.J. Brush Bongshin Lee Ratul Mahajan Sharad Agarwal Stefan Saroiu Colin Dixon

2. Smart Homes • Is it possible to create a home environment that is aware of its occupants whereabouts and activities? Georgia Tech Aware Home Develop a home that essentially programs itself by observing the lifestyle and desires of the inhabitants, and learning to anticipate and accommodate their needs The Adaptive House, Mozer et al.

3. Don’t forget Hollywood It's up to Ben to match wits with PAT's central intelligence and "out-smart" the Smart House once and for all!

4. Home Automation Capability to automate and control multiple disparate systems Motion sensor Door sensor Camera Programmed light switches Wall Panels Phone Access Lucero, S., Burden, K. Home Automation and Control, ABI Research 2010

5. Adopting Home Automation Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Outsourced Our goal: Better understand current state of home automation and learn from people’s long term use.

6. Study Method • 14 households with one or more of the following: • Remote lighting control • Multi-room audio/video systems • Security cameras • Motion detectors Outsourced DIY Home Tour Questionnaire Inventory Semi-Structured Interview Chetty, M., Sung, J-Y., Grinter, R. How Smart Homes Learn: The Evolution of the Networked Home and Household. Proc. UbiComp 2007, 127-144.

7. Related Work Inspirations • Technology guruand consumers • Financial considerations • Automation for religious purposes • Long-term general use of home automation Poole, E., Chetty, M., Grinter, R., Edwards, W.K. More than Meets the Eye: Transforming the User Experience of Home Network Management. Proc. DIS 2008. Rode, J., Toye, E., Blackwell, A. The Domestic Economy: a Broader Unit of Analysis for End User Programming. Proc. CHI 2005. Grinter, R., Edwards, W., Chetty, M., Poole, E.S., Sung, J.-Y., Yang, J., Crabtree, A., Tolmie, P., Rodden, T., Greenhalgh,C., Benford, S. The ins and outs of home networking: The case for useful and usable domestic networking. ACM ToCHI 16, 2(2009). Woodruff, A., Augustin, S., Foucalt, B. Sabbath Day Home Automation: “It‟s Like Mixing Technology and Religion” Proc. CHI 2007.

8. Living with Automation Convenience “It allows me to be lazy, honestly, because every day [before automation] I would go double check the locks, make sure all the lights are off on all the floors and make sure that everything’s closed.” Technology consumer from DIY house 6, D6_C

9. Why? Peace of Mind Control O: over various devices DIY: over what they installed and enabled. Monitoring

10. Diversity in Installation & Desires From X10 to control a few lights to embedded panels in every room Control Media Security Environment

11. Augmented, Not Smart User-controlled Rule-based

12. Not ready for broad adoption 4 barriers Cost, Inflexibility, Manageability, Security Caveat 1: Not problems for our participants Caveat 2: Not answering whether functionality is generally appealing

13. Barrier 1: High Cost of Ownership + DIY: $200 - $60,000, $5,000 median DIYs trade-off lower monetary cost for time O: $13,500 – $120,000 $40,000 median

14. Barrier 1: High Cost of Ownership Two Surprises Consultant visits not a big factor Low perceived value of additional applications

15. Barrier 2: Inflexibility Integration Ease or Flexibility DIY: Use expertise to overcomeOutsource: Choose one brand Structural or Retrofit? (9 put automation in place during structural changes) Surprise: Thinking ahead to moving…

16. Barrier 3: Poor Manageability Our households were well-equipped to manage Complex UI Consultant Required “I started explaining the panel (how to call fire department) to them and they looked in dread. People just don’t want to touch it. And my own mother sat in our house in the dark, because she was scared to touch any of the controls.” Difficult to customize for Outsourced

17. Barrier 3: Poor Manageability Iteration required “I thought when I went into this, I’d want my alarm system integrated and I’d want these automatic features firing off in the background like, you know, I’d wake up and music is playing in my bathroom and the lights come up, you know all these Jetson type things. And the challenge with that, while they’re all great, I don’t live that structured of a life, not waking up into [it] every day, and I'm not going in the shower every day at the same time. And you know, I don't want to hear music all the time. So I don’t think the routineness of automation is what I was really wanting.” (D8_G)

18. Barrier 4: Difficulty Achieving Security Remote access • Eight households currently have remote access enabled • Tension between convenience and security Very technically savvy participants concerned about vulnerability of remote access Cameras Door locks

19. Simple User Groups for Future Needs • What restrictions would you place (if any) on applications you were interested in buying? • Presence based security • All other restrictions: • Adult household member • Child household member • Guest • Household technology guru

20. Implications for Research Bandwidth Needs vs. Structural Changes

21. Implications for Research Bandwidth Needs vs. Structural Changes • Standalone Devices vs. Home Integration • Individually managed sub-systems • Cross-device functionality challenging • Hard to incrementally add functionality

22. Implications for Research Bandwidth Needs vs. Structural Changes • Standalone Devices vs. Home Integration • Individually managed sub-systems • Cross-device functionality challenging • Hard to incrementally add functionality Simple Confidence-building Security vs. Desired Functionality

23. Concluding Remarks • Interviewed 14 households with home automation, DIY and Outsourced • 4 Barriers to broader adoption: • Cost of ownership (Time & Money) • Inflexibility • Poor Manageability • Difficulty Achieving Security • Identify directions for future research • Eliminate the need for structural changes • Enable composition of home devices • Simple security that can be confidently configured

24. Thanks! HomeOS: The Home Needs an Operating System (and a App Store) HotNets IX Dixon, C., Mahajan, R., Agarwal, S., Brush, A., Lee, B., Saroui, S., Bahl, V., Ask us if you are interested…. A.J. Brush Bongshin Lee Ratul Mahajan Sharad Agarwal Stefan Saroiu Colin Dixon