Author(s)

Yu Zhai¹, Yan Liu¹, Minghao Yang¹, Feiyuan Long¹, Johanna Virkki^2*

¹Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
²Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland.

It is not yet clear how smart home technologies and applications will actually be accepted as part of our everyday lives. In this research, the thoughts of 248 people about smart homes were collected by interviews and with an Internet survey in Europe and Asia. It was found that people have very versatile thoughts about what the term “smart home” means in practice and when smart houses will become part of our daily lives. The Asian answerers can be considered to be slightly more optimistic about the schedule. The majority of the answerers were found to be interested in versatile smart home applications and willing to live in a smart house. The cost can be considered to be their biggest worry and the Asian answerers were found to be more worried about the reliability, practicability, and cost than the answerers from Europe. Also some privacy concerns were found from both the European and the Asian answerers.

Asia, Europe, Internet Survey, Interviews, Personal Perspectives, Smart Homes

Zhai, Y. , Liu, Y. , Yang, M. , Long, F. and Virkki, J. (2014) A Survey Study of the Usefulness and Concerns about Smart Home Applications from the Human Perspective. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 2, 119-126. doi: 10.4236/jss.2014.211017.