Adoption of Socio-Cultural Aspects in PSS Design for Smart Home Products: An Integrative Review

Abstract

Background Smart homes are becoming an increasingly integral part of our daily lives. Smart homes consist of domestic Internet of Things (IoT) products that are connected to a communication network and provide various functions and services to their consumers with the purpose of improvement of their quality of life. However previous research suggests there is very limited usercentric research published in this domain. One of the main factors for the success of smart homes is the acceptance and adoption of technology by new users. This report presents a literature review conducted with the aim of exploring smart homes, their characteristics, advantages, and challenges perceived by the consumer. This paper investigates various factors influencing the acceptance and adoption of new technologies by consumers and how the design of smart homes can be integrated with a product-service system (PSS), considering socio-cultural aspects. Methods The study is an integrative review of papers from major journals in design, consumer research, management, and marketing on the topic of smart home IoT products from 2000 to 2020 relevant articles were shortlisted and analyzed considering the purpose, method, and main findings of the studies. Results The four major categories that emerged through the analysis of the shortlisted articles are as follows: 1. The Terminology used in smart home and IoT products, 2. Consumer behavior and its relationship with the other factors such as benefits, barriers, and socio-cultural aspects in smart homes, 3. New technology acceptance, and 4. Product service system (PSS) design in smart homes. Conclusions A multi-faceted evaluation of articles of the first two categories proposes a new theoretical framework investigating consumer behavior related to smart homes and IoT product adoption. The framework is described illustrating key terms and associations between them with future directions on smart home IoT products. It is expected that design practitioners and researchers would find the developed framework helpful while designing IoT products