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. 2020 May 29;15(5):e0231615.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0231615. eCollection 2020.

Trust in the smart home: Findings from a nationally representative survey in the UK

Sara Cannizzaro  1   2 , Rob Procter  2 , Sinong Ma  3 , Carsten Maple  1
Affiliations

Trust in the smart home: Findings from a nationally representative survey in the UK

Sara Cannizzaro et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Businesses in the smart home sector are actively promoting the benefits of smart home technologies for consumers, such as convenience, economy and home security. To better understand meanings of and trust in the smart home, we carried out a nationally representative survey of UK consumers designed to measure adoption and acceptability, focusing on awareness, ownership, experience, trust, satisfaction and intention to use. We analysed the results using theories of meanings and acceptability of technologies including semiotics, social construction of technology (SCOT) and sociotechnical affordance. Our findings suggest that the meaning and value proposition of the smart home have not yet achieved closure for consumers, but is already foregrounding risks to privacy and security amongst the other meaning-making possibilities it could afford. Anxiety about the likelihood of a security incident emerges as a prominent factor influencing adoption of smart home technology. This factor negatively impacts adoption. These findings underline how businesses and policymakers will need to work together to act on the sociotechnical affordances of smart home technology in order to increase consumers' trust. This intervention is necessary if barriers to adoption and acceptability of the smart home are to be addressed now and in the future.

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Conflict of interest statement

no competing interests

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Results for awareness of the expression ‘Internet of things’ (Q1).
Fig 2
Fig 2. Results for awareness of the expression ‘smart home’ (Q2).
Fig 3
Fig 3. Overall results for ownership and usage of specific smart home devices (03).
Fig 4
Fig 4. Experience of use indicating both the amount of experienced versus inexperienced smart home users and the time in which the technology was first adopted.
(Q = E5).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. Alvesson M, and Sandberg J Generating Research Questions through Problematization. The Academy of Management Review. 2011;36(2): 247–271.
    1. Cannizzaro, S and Procter, R. The limits of ‘adoption as acceptance’: a humanist proposal for acceptable adoption studies of the Internet of Things; forthcoming.

Publication types