Leena Alghamdi: Hi! This is Leena Alghamdi. I am a PhD student at University of Central Florida. I will be presenting our work on sharing smart home devices with other people outside the home for the purpose of co-monitoring in home emergencies.
Leena Alghamdi: Smart home are becoming more common with unexpected 13.5 billion smart home devices in active use by 2025.
Leena Alghamdi: These devices can provide a safe environment by protecting against various threats such as fire, water leaks, and theft.
Leena Alghamdi: Smart home security systems offer benefits over traditional in-home systems, allowing owners to receive real time notifications and increase chances of early mitigation.
Leena Alghamdi: However, they have downsides, including being expensive and prone to false alarms, which can be costly and result in missed notifications of real emergencies if not professionally monitored.
Leena Alghamdi: Smart home Owners may not want to pay for professional security monitoring, but are not always available to perform emergency monitoring themselves. Recent research has shown that many smart home device owners are willing to share their devices with trusted individuals outside their homes for in home emergency co-monitoring. This work explores the potential benefits, drawbacks, and design considerations of sharing smart home devices with others for this purpose.
Leena Alghamdi: with the goal of the developing a co-monitoring mobile app for smart home device owners.
Leena Alghamdi: The study aims to answer high level research questions related to the concept of co-monitoring and how it can be effectively implemented. So what are the potential benefits and drawbacks of sharing smart home devices with other people outside the home for in home emergency co-monitoring?
And what are the important design considerations and users need for designing a smart home emergency co-monitoring system.
Leena Alghamdi: we conducted 26 co-design interviews with 50 smart home device owners (24 dyads of 2 participants plus 2 sessions with individuals) we used a multi-model methodological approach
Leena Alghamdi: where we presented scenarios related to smart home emergency situations, and asked questions to prompt participants to reflect on their perceptions and concerns in that context.
Leena Alghamdi: Participants were then asked to design features for an emergency co-monitoring app for sharing access to their smart home devices with other people outside their homes (like emergency contacts)
Leena Alghamdi: for in home emergency co-monitoring.
Leena Alghamdi: While existing co-monitoring wasn't a selection criteria for this study, a number of participants reported this already occurring. 26% of participants already shared their smart home devices with trusted people who live outside of their house or had access to others' devices
Leena Alghamdi: Overall, we found that most participants saw benefits in co-monitoring their smart home devices with trusted emergency contacts, as it would help them ensure personal safety, safeguard from material loss and provide peace of mind by ensuring quick emergency response and verifying potential threats.
Leena Alghamdi: As verification was particularly important if any automated actions could occur following a smart device alert, such as notifying authorities. Participants acknowledged that smart home devices produce many false positives, and thus waste the time of emergency responders if there is a false alarm.
Leena Alghamdi: For our participants, they saw their emergency contacts as an intermediate between an alert notification and a call to the authorities.
Leena Alghamdi: However, having their emergency contacts watch over their homes, would also potentially invade their privacy and overburden emergency contacts.
Leena Alghamdi: They also felt that co-monitoring with outsiders might open their homes to new threats, such as unauthorized access to their homes and security beaches that might occur when smart home devices were shared with others.
Leena Alghamdi: To Allevite these concerns, participants designed co-monitoring features such that they could have flexible and granular controls on the access of emergency contacts, by limiting access duration, devices and device activities.
Leena Alghamdi: Many participants also mentioned that, granting access for an unlimited period of time could cause major privacy and security issues, so they designed features to enable them to easily revoke access from specific emergency contacts at any time.
Leena Alghamdi: Many participants also, such as some additional features to ensure transparency on the emergency contact status, so that they can better organize and manage the co-monitoring in case of an emergency alert.
Leena Alghamdi: For example, some participants design location features to view the precise location of all of their trusted emergency contact with whom their smart Home devices are shared.
Leena Alghamdi: Some participants also designed a feature to check on emergency contacts activity to determine whether an emergency contact is actively monitoring their smart home devices through the co-monitoring app.
Leena Alghamdi: As a number of participants had concerns over improper access of their devices, participants then designed features to help mitigate these concerns, and allow them to monitor or protect against such risks.
Leena Alghamdi: Thus, some participants introduced a feature to confirm any changes made on emergency notification settings, either by the smart home device owner or the emergency contacts.
Leena Alghamdi: Participants also wanted to have another security feature that logs all activities of the smart home devices.
Leena Alghamdi: Most of our participants also suggested additional features that would ensure that the emergency notifications are difficult to ignore or overlook.
Leena Alghamdi: Many participants recommended a feature for unique and loud alert sounds based on the emergency type.
Leena Alghamdi: Participants also suggested that the co- monitoring app should send notifications in such a way that it can override the phone's do not disturb or silent mode.
Leena Alghamdi: And even though we asked our participant to design an app for in home emergency co-monitoring, some participants wanted features that would directly send notifications or call emergency response.
Leena Alghamdi: so that the situation could be handled in a timely manner by professionals.
Leena Alghamdi: Also, they wanted the app to have built-in intelligence to decide whether the situation is actually an emergency or not before sending notifications or notifying the emergency response directly.
Leena Alghamdi: We found that people want to protect their homes and desire help in monitoring them
Leena Alghamdi: but automated emergency response systems are expensive and still suffer from false alarms. Participants recognized the benefits of co-monitoring with trusted contacts, which may be preferred over professionally monitored alarm systems.
Leena Alghamdi: Sharing devices raises privacy concerns but the potential to improve emergency response, and peace of mind outweighs those concerns for many.
Leena Alghamdi: smart home system designers should provide features that allow users to weigh the adoption,use,and sharing of their devices against privacy intrusions. Future research is needed to determine how false positives occur
Leena Alghamdi: and designe to further mitigate them.
Leena Alghamdi: The study found that privacy concerns are a major factor in the adoption of co-monitoring applications for smart home devices, with users only willing to share their devices with those they trust. However, some of the solutions proposed by
Leena Alghamdi: participants to mitigate these concerns may introduce their own privacy issues such as data collection and location tracking. Additionally, participants expressed concern about security attacks and unauthorized access
Leena Alghamdi: of recorded information by third parties as a result of sharing for co-monitoring. The study recommends that designers of smart home devices consider these privacy and security concerns, and adopt trauma-informed practices when
Leena Alghamdi: developing technologies that may exacerbate existing time.
Leena Alghamdi: The study explores features and mechanisms required in an app for emergency co-monitoring of smart home. devices.
Leena Alghamdi: Granular access control is the most important feature required for managing access levels
Leena Alghamdi: based on schedule, device, type, relationships, and location. However, existing, sharing interfaces lack transparency, making it difficult for users to determine what exactly is being shared. Providing transparency and a full understanding of accecc control is challenging, but methods
Leena Alghamdi: are needed to help users build that understanding.
Leena Alghamdi: Designers need to balance flexibility and simplicity to meet user needs and provide controls that support common use cases. Therefore, our results suggest
Leena Alghamdi: a set of design guidelines specific to smart home emergency co-monitoring.
Leena Alghamdi: The study found that peer-based co-monitoring of smarthomes for emergencies could be beneficial in terms of ensuring personal safety and safeguarding from material loss. However, concerns regarding privacy and security breaches were expressed.
Leena Alghamdi: To address these concerns, participants suggested flexible and granular access control
Leena Alghamdi: and fail-safe back up features.
Leena Alghamdi: Our study provides recommendations for designing technologies that facilitate co-monitoring while mitigating its risks. Thank you for watching.