How Do People Adapt to Use of an IoT Air Purifier ? : From Low Expectation to Minimal Use

The term Internet of Things (IoT) has been around since its inception in 1999 (Ashton, 2011), and the definition of IoT is expanding from machine-to-machine communication without human interaction to scenarios in which the Internet connects people to devices and everyday items that have computing capabilities (Brown, 2016; Rose, Eldridge, & Chapin, 2015). Thanks to a variety of open wireless technologies, sensors, and actuators that enable the IoT, the market size of the IoT is predicted to increase to 520 billion dollars in 2021, which is more than double the 235 billion dollars value of 2017 (Columbus, 2018). As such, the IoT has clearly solidified its presence in the market, and it has received significant attention in academia following the previous studies on pervasive computing. The area of smart homes has changed because of the IoT (De Silva, Morikawa, & Petra, 2012), and there have been studies on how users incorporate them into their lives. We conduct a four-week user study to investigate how users adapt to an IoT air purifier at home. Due to the ambiguity of the definition of the IoT, we want to see how users adapt to an IoT product at home and how its IoT features affect their adaptation process. Taking a user-centered approach to IoT, our research aims to understand what stages nonexpert users go through when adapting to these products and what promotes transition to the next stage, as well as to obtain design implications to develop a better IoT product usage experience for the future. Focusing on IoT at home, we chose an IoT air purifier as the target product for the study. There are a number of IoT products available on the market, and we looked at the components that make up IoT devices to set the criteria, which include hardware (sensors, actuators, and communication hardware), middleware, and storage (Gubbi, Buyya, Marusic, & Palaniswami, 2013), while IoT resources include sensors, actuators, storage, and user interface (Patel & Cassou, 2015). We decided to look for a product that had sensors, actuators, and a user interface so that we could observe how users perceive and adapt to the IoT device rather than simply adapting to the data display from sensors, and we could also identify how those IoT components influence user experience. Therefore, a product that does not have a sensor and requires user control or a product that does not have an actuator and therefore can only be monitored was excluded, and thus chose an IoT air purifier that meets these criteria. This product receives the outdoor air quality (OAQ) of the area through the Internet, measures indoor air quality (IAQ) with its built-in sensor (the sensor component), cleans air using a purifying function that is activated by sensed data (the actuator component), and displays this information through the LED of the product and its smartphone application (the user interface component). Additionally, this product aligns with the viewpoint that the IoT should be integrated into products that users already use in their daily lives (Jia, Wu, Jung, Shapiro, & Sundar, 2012). ORIGINAL ARTICLE