Adoption and Acceptability of Smart Devices for the Home

There are expectations that the market for smart home devices in Europe will triple by 2023. If this growth is to be realised, it is important for providers to understand the considerations and issues for adoption and acceptance of such technologies. In this paper, we address this by reporting results from a nationally representative survey of a sample of 2101 British consumers to measure adoption rates through experience of use and acceptability attitudes, through trust, risk awareness, satisfaction and intention to use smart home devices in the future. We interrogated the survey responses based on key influential demographics such as gender, age and education. Overall, we found that males have a slightly more favourable attitude towards smart home devices than females, that younger people are more likely to hold favourable attitudes towards smart home devices than older people, and that people with primary and secondary education levels are the least interested in smart home devices. It was also ascertained that trust was negatively correlated with being female, and positively correlated with age and education. For education, higher trust was linked to lower risk awareness. This research outlines social divides in smart home devices adoption and raises questions about what kind of business models or policy interventions may be required to level these adoption challenges.