At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges

Introduction

The smart home technologies are fast becoming one of the most popular internet of things. These IoTs help to create a safe and secure home and can be easily controlled by voice activation or an app. They have come a long way and continue to grow at a rapid rate. These trends have increased the likelihood that the aware home can soon become a reality but there are still some technical, social, and pragmatic issues to be addressed before we get to that point.

This paper aims to raise seven challenges that these researchers feel we must overcome in order to make smart homes with ubiquitous computing into a reality. These challenges cover the problems that arise from the ways in which we expect smart homes to be deployed and inhabited; technical questions of interoperability, manageability, and reliability; social concerns about the adoption of domestic technologies and the implications of such technologies; and design issues that arise from considering just how smart the smart home must be (Edwards and Grinter)

Challenges

The “Accidentally” Smart Home

In the present time, houses are not yet built with all the necessary infrastructure to support the new ubiquitous technologies. So the research group designed and built an environment from the ground up to support and evaluate various smart home technologies deployed there. This helped them to see and raise different issues through experiments. The first challenge was realized was the transition alone from a dumb to smart home.

Will the occupant-users be prepared to manage their smart home when the time comes? (Edwards and Grinter) . The research shows concern for occupant-users who have to adapt to the idea that their home has suddenly reached a level of complexity at which it becomes unpredictable. The design challenge is to provide affordances to help users understand the technology.

Impromptu Interoperability

The second challenge goes off from the first one to address the level of intelligence and interoperability, an important characteristic of the smart home. With fluid, impromptu interoperability, individual technologies have the potential to create a fabric of complementary functionality. Our challenge is to ensure that the future of the smart home is not one of incompatibility and isolated islands of functionality, but rather one in which occupant-users can expect the systems in their home to work together fluidly (Edwards and Grinter). The main limitation of impromptu interoperability is that every device or software service must be explicitly written to understand every other type of device or software that it may encounter. This challenge makes it impossible to create seamless exchange if not tackled. New models of interconnectivity, that are beyond the current exchange, are being explored and tested.

No Systems Administrator

The number of computer systems in our households increases regularly, and most people have to figure out how to install and support all their PCs. With a full establishment of a smart home, the system administrator tasks could become more than a regular user can handle. How will we design technologies for the smart home that require no on-site expert? (Edwards and Grinter)

There have been various approaches to this problem. One of them is creating systems that can perform remote diagnosis, administration, and software upgrades but also have the right security to prevent access issues or mishaps. There is also a focus on creating “appliance-centric” computing in which digital devices embody some single function to keep the appliances as simple and minimal as possible.

Designing for Domestic Use

This section focuses on studying domestic settings to get information on safely designing for home routines. They use a really good example of the expectations of the telephone from the inventors, vendors and users. The inventors predicted that it could be used for social settings but neither the telephone company nor users thought it could be used for socializing.

The users only got it for emergency and coordination reasons but in the later weeks, we saw that they eventually used this device for social calls. This study helped them to realize that anyone could find it hard to foresee how a technology could be used or its impact. It is difficult to predict the disruptions that will arise from smart technologies which is why there is a challenge to extensively study how home occupants appropriate and adapt new technologies.

Social Implications of Aware Home Technologies

The next challenge examines the social issues that could rise from automation at home. It focuses on two consequences; labor saving and good parenting in relation to children’s use of phones and tv. For labor saving, they use the example of the washing machine. It was created to help reduce the labor but because it was accompanied into the market by hot water heaters, irons, and indoor bathrooms, it changed the view on hygiene. Individually they helped reduce labor but as a whole, they created a dramatic increase in the unpaid work done by women at home. The challenges the designers face is being aware of the broader effects of their creations on the dynamics of the home and society itself.

Reliability

There are already a large range of domestic technologies present in the home today like televisions, telephones, washing machines, microwave ovens are largely exceeding the levels of reliability, even though these are devices of great complexity. There is a high expectation to achieve this level of reliability and greater in smart homes. This can prove to be a great challenge. This challenge extends beyond the research community to those who develop, deliver, regulate, and consume these new services. They all have to come up with ways that fit into creating a uniform developing culture that allows for the right and reliable design choices.

Inference in the Presence of Ambiguity

The last challenge discusses the level of inference these devices will have that will be just enough. Systems in which machine processing is used to control or assist human behavior have a long and less-than-storied track record in the history of computer science and literature of ubiquitous computing depicts machine inference and intent as a crucial factor in building smart home environments (Edwards and Grinter). There is a challenge in knowing when the inference is getting out of hand.

How smart does the smart home have to be? How much inference is required for these environments to be successful? What benefits can be achieved with limited inference, or with no inference at all? In the absence of oracular artificial intelligence, how will we design such environments so that their occupants have models about what they can expect their homes to do for them, and how to fix the results of interpretations gone bad?

Conclusion

The paper presented seven individual, but also overlapping connections, challenges in ubiquitous computing research in creating a smart home. The paper served as an excellent report illuminating some implications of technical changes involved in smart homes that must be understood in order to produce safe and domestic computing technology and that existing domestic technologies can influence the designs of smart homes (Edwards and Grinter) .

This paper helps to raise awareness of these issues and increase studies on the various obstacles faced in the smart envrionment. If researchers can successfully address these challenges, the smart home can be a viable place to live.