Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, Coventry, England, United Kingdom.
Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry, England, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2020 May 29;15(5):e0231615. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0231615. eCollection 2020.
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.
智能家居行业的企业积极向消费者宣传智能家居技术的好处，例如便利性、经济性和家庭安全性。为了更好地理解智能家居的含义和信任，我们对英国消费者进行了一项全国代表性调查，旨在衡量采用和接受度，重点关注意识、所有权、经验、信任、满意度和使用意向。我们使用包括符号学、技术的社会建构（SCOT）和社会技术赋权在内的技术含义和可接受性理论来分析结果。我们的研究结果表明，智能家居的含义和价值主张尚未为消费者所确定，但已经突显了隐私和安全风险，以及它可能带来的其他意义建构可能性。对安全事件发生可能性的担忧成为影响智能家居技术采用的一个突出因素。这个因素对采用产生了负面影响。这些发现强调了企业和政策制定者将需要共同努力，利用智能家居技术的社会技术赋权，以增加消费者的信任。如果要解决现在和未来智能家居采用和接受度的障碍，这种干预是必要的。
