Jacob Abbott (Indiana University), Jayati Dev (Indiana University), DongInn Kim (Indiana University), Shakthidhar Reddy Gopavaram (Indiana University), Meera Iyer (Indiana University), Shivani Sadam (Indiana University) , Shirang Mare (Western Washington University), Tatiana Ringenberg (Purdue University), Vafa Andalibi (Indiana University), and L. Jean Camp(Indiana University)
In the last decade integration of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems has increased exponentially, and it is necessary that our understanding of human behavior when interacting with multiple smart devices in an IoT ecosystem keep pace. To better understand users’ perceptions and use of in-home IoT ecosystem over time, we implemented an ecosystem in homes of participants so that we could both test previous findings about individual devices and identify differences that arise in the content of a home with multiple IoT devices. Specifically, we recruited eight participants from separate households who installed identical IoT configurations, and interviewed each participant for five weeks. We included an Android dashboard to provide device control and data transparency. We detail the semi-structured interviews to compare user perceptions of what devices are classified as IoT, the perceived sustainability of IoT devices, interactions with and desires of dashboard information, and exploration of current notification preferences and mitigation strategies. We discuss the factors which participants identified as being relevant to their personal experiences with IoT devices and contribute recommendations for dashboard designs and control mechanisms for IoT devices. We note that the participants uniformly had a more expansive definition of IoT than that found in much of the previous literature, implying that our understanding of perceptions of in-home IoT may be informed by previous research on security systems, wearables, watches, and phones. We identify where our results reify findings of studies of those devices.