Smart Homes from vision to reality : eliciting users' preferences of Smart Homes by a virtual experimental method

The notion of smart home has been extensively discussed in ubiquitous computing literature. There are some real experiences with smart homes mostly in Domotic and Ambient Assisted Livings. Nevertheless, the developments of smart homes in wider domains such as future housing industries have not been fully explored. For making smart homes as new types of dwelling in future cities, designers need to take in to account users' preferences and satisfaction factors of future daily livings and future home environments in smart home design. In this paper, we explore users' satisfaction factors that affect smart home design. Since users' satisfaction factors of a smart home are based on not only technical aspects but also on other living and spatial aspects, we propose a conceptual framework for eliciting users' preferences of both living preferences and environmental preferences. This elicitation process is based on multiple virtual experiments which are discussed in the paper. The upcoming results give designers a true understanding of people's latent needs and preferences of a smart home. Such a user-centered design approach leads to increase the acceptance of smart homes and gives designers the opportunity of making smart homes for everybody.