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Learning from a learning thermostat: lessons for intelligent systems for the home

Published: 08 September 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Everyday systems and devices in the home are becoming smarter. In order to better understand the challenges of deploying an intelligent system in the home, we studied the experience of living with an advanced thermostat, the Nest. The Nest utilizes machine learning, sensing, and networking technology, as well as eco-feedback features. We conducted interviews with 23 participants, ten of whom also participated in a three-week diary study. Our findings show that while the Nest was well-received overall, the intelligent features of the Nest were not perceived to be as useful or intuitive as expected, in particular due to the system's inability to understand the intent behind sensed behavior and users' difficulty in understanding how the Nest works. A number of participants developed workarounds for the shortcomings they encountered. Based on our observations, we propose three avenues for future development of interactive intelligent technologies for the home: exception flagging, incidental intelligibility, and constrained engagement.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UbiComp '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international joint conference on Pervasive and ubiquitous computing
    September 2013
    846 pages
    ISBN:9781450317702
    DOI:10.1145/2493432
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 08 September 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. intelligent systems
    2. smart home
    3. sustainability

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    • (2024)Exploring End Users' Perceptions of Smart Lock Automation Within the Smart Home EnvironmentProceedings of the 2024 European Symposium on Usable Security10.1145/3688459.3688480(112-124)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
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