Analysis of IFTTT Recipes to Study How Humans Use Internet-of-Things (IoT) Devices

Abstract

With the rapid development and usage of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and smart-home devices, researchers continue efforts to improve the "smartness"of those devices to address daily needs in people's lives. Such efforts usually begin with understanding evolving user behaviors on how humans utilize the devices and what they expect in terms of their behavior. However, while research efforts abound, there is a very limited number of datasets that researchers can use to both understand how people use IoT devices and to evaluate algorithms or systems for smart spaces. In this paper, we collect and characterize more than 50,000 recipes from the online If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) service to understand a seemingly straightforward but complicated question: "What kinds of behaviors do humans expect from their IoT devices?"The dataset we collected contains the basic information of the IFTTT rules, trigger and action events, and how many people are using each rule.