home automation in the wild: challenges and opportunities a.j. brush bongshin lee ratul mahajan...
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Home Automation in the Wild:Challenges and Opportunities
A.J. Brush
Bongshin Lee
Ratul Mahajan
Sharad Agarwal
Stefan Saroiu
Colin Dixon
Microsoft Research 2
Smart Homes
Is it possible to create a home environment that is aware of its occupants whereabouts and activities?
The Adaptive House, Mozer et al.
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
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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!
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Home AutomationCapability 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
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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.
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Study Method14 households with one or more of the following:Remote lighting controlMulti-room audio/video systemsSecurity camerasMotion detectors
Inventory Semi-Structured Interview
Questionnaire Home Tour
Outsourced DIY
Chetty, M., Sung, J-Y., Grinter, R. How Smart Homes Learn: The Evolution of the Networked Home and Household. Proc. UbiComp 2007, 127-144.
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• Technology guru and consumers• Financial considerations• Automation for religious purposes
Related Work Inspirations
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.
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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
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Why?
Peace of Mind
O: over various devicesDIY: over what they installed and enabled.
Control
Monitoring
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Diversity in Installation & DesiresFrom X10 to control a few lights to embedded panels in every room
Ability t
o set s
cenes
Centra
lized
contro
l
View co
mputer co
ntent o
n TV
Watc
h reco
rded
TV on an
y TV in
house
View co
mputer co
ntent o
n mobile
phone
Show m
obile phone c
ontent o
n TV
Transfe
r video
calls
betwee
n device
s
Remote
acce
ss to
home cam
eras
Automati
c aler
ts
Remotel
y open
front d
oor
Log p
eople'
s use
of dev
ices
Time l
imits
acro
ss multiple
device
s
Watc
h child
pc use
on TV
Therm
ostat t
hat lea
rns r
outines
House en
ergy m
onitor
Presen
ce base
d device
s
Adjust windows a
nd shad
es au
tomati
cally
0
5
10
15
20
25
Have Buy
Not
Media Security EnvironmentControl
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Augmented, Not Smart
User-controlled
Rule-based
Not ready for broad adoption
Caveat 1: Not problems for our participantsCaveat 2: Not answering whether functionality
is generally appealing
4 barriers Cost, Inflexibility, Manageability, Security
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Barrier 1: High Cost of Ownership
+DIY: $200 - $60,000, $5,000 median
O: $13,500 – $120,000 $40,000 median
DIYs trade-off lower monetary cost for time
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Barrier 1: High Cost of Ownership
Consultant visits not a big factor
Two Surprises
Low perceived value of additional applications
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Barrier 2: Inflexibility
Structural or Retrofit?(9 put automation in place during structural changes)
Surprise: Thinking ahead to moving…
DIY: Use expertise to overcomeOutsource: Choose one brand
Integration Ease or Flexibility
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Barrier 3: Poor Manageability
Our households were well-equipped to manage
Difficult to customize for Outsourced
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.”
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Barrier 3: Poor ManageabilityIteration 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)
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Remote access– Eight households currently have
remote access enabled– Tension between convenience and security
Barrier 4: Difficulty Achieving Security
Door locks Cameras
Very technically savvy participants concerned about vulnerability of remote access
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• 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
Simple User Groups for Future Needs
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Implications for Research
Bandwidth Needs vs. Structural Changes
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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
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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
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• 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
Concluding Remarks
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Thanks!
Bongshin Lee
Ratul Mahajan
Sharad Agarwal
Stefan Saroiu
Colin Dixon
A.J. Brush
HomeOS:The Home Needs an Operating System (and a App Store)HotNets IXDixon, C., Mahajan, R., Agarwal, S., Brush, A., Lee, B., Saroui, S., Bahl, V.,
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