Co-designing Community-based Sharing of Smarthome Devices for the Purpose of Co-monitoring In-home Emergencies

Title of the Paper

Co-designing Community-based Sharing of Smarthome Devices for the Purpose of Co-monitoring In-home Emergencies

Bibliographic Information

• Subject Area: Design of Smart Home Device Sharing and Collaborative Disaster Monitoring Systems
• Keywords: Smart home, collaborative monitoring, smart devices, co-design, privacy, security, protection, community sharing, emergencies, user needs

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Problems or Challenges: Smart home devices can provide home safety monitoring, but professional monitoring services are costly and prone to false alarms, while personal monitoring may result in delayed emergency responses due to user absence or negligence.
• Significance: Home emergencies such as fires and burglaries have serious consequences for life and property, making rapid response crucial.
• Research Motivation and Related Work:
  • Surveys reveal that many users are willing to share their smart home devices with trusted contacts outside the household to assist in monitoring, but there is currently a lack of systems designed to support such collaborative monitoring while addressing privacy concerns.
  • Previous research has primarily focused on access control, privacy issues, and shared usage of smart home devices, but the design support for collaborative monitoring in emergencies requires further exploration.

Research Objectives and Questions

• Research Objectives: To explore the potential benefits, drawbacks, and design considerations of sharing smart home devices for emergency collaborative monitoring, and to design a mobile application system to support this use case.
• Research Questions:
  • RQ1: Why are users willing to share devices for collaborative monitoring of home emergencies? What are the motivations and potential benefits of this practice?
  • RQ2: What are the main drawbacks and barriers to device sharing?
  • RQ3: What are users' needs and suggestions for the design of a collaborative monitoring system?

Solutions

• Proposed Methods or Solutions: Design a mobile application system for emergency monitoring of smart home devices based on user co-participation.

  • Conduct collaborative design interviews with 50 smart home users to deeply explore system requirements.
  • Design a mobile application interface featuring multi-level access control, device sharing management, and privacy protection.

• Innovations:

  • Introduced more granular access control options (e.g., time-based restrictions, device functionality limitations).
  • Overcame limitations of existing smart home device sharing systems by adding emergency notification responses, transparent data access records, and misuse prevention.
  • Emphasized user collaboration while safeguarding privacy to enhance willingness to use the system.

• Implementation Steps:

  1. Recruit users and conduct in-depth interviews to clarify their needs and concerns.
  2. Develop emergency scenario storyboards to demonstrate the potential use of device sharing in home emergencies.
  3. Engage users in co-design sessions to create functional interfaces and provide specific suggestions.
  4. Analyze user feedback using thematic analysis to summarize design guidelines.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Findings:

  • Users believe collaborative monitoring can enhance home safety, reduce property loss, and provide psychological reassurance.
  • Users are concerned about privacy violations, including data breaches, unauthorized access, and device misuse, and worry about imposing a monitoring burden on emergency contacts.

• Advantages Over Existing Solutions:

  • Offers more granular and flexible device-sharing mechanisms, such as time-based sharing and sharing specific device functionalities.
  • Enhances the prominence of emergency notifications (e.g., unique sounds, persistent alerts, overriding "Do Not Disturb" mode) to ensure they are not missed.
  • Adds features to help users directly contact the nearest emergency contact or enable automatic emergency response options.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • Conducted thematic analysis of interviews and design content from 26 user groups, identifying specific needs for access control, transparency, notification design, and automated response features.
  • The system's functionalities alleviated most privacy and monitoring burden concerns, increasing user acceptance of this sharing model.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations:
    • Interviews were based on hypothetical scenarios, and actual behavior in real-world environments may differ.
    • The sample was biased toward users with higher acceptance of smart devices, excluding broader social groups, particularly those with heightened privacy sensitivities.
  • Future Directions:
    • Conduct in-depth research on vulnerable groups such as children, LGBTQ+ users, or survivors of intimate partner violence.
    • Explore how to design safer, privacy-enhanced, and more universally applicable smart home emergency collaborative monitoring systems.

This study highlights community-based collaborative monitoring as a significant application of smart home device sharing, revealing its vast potential in the future of smart living. The core of the system design lies in balancing the convenience of collaborative monitoring with the protection of user privacy.