Modeling Usersʼ Work Activities in a Smart Home

Abstract

Almost everyone would agree that teleworking is increasingly growing; but beyond this broad statement, we know little about how people behave when they work at home and how they balance their work and life. User comfort and productivity cannot be addressed properly, without a deep understanding of usersʼ working behavior. This gap is even deeper when it comes to the domain of smart homes as new types of housing which aim to enhance working at home. Hence, more user-centered studies are needed to comprehend the interrelationships among housing, technology, daily life and the work activities. In this paper, we use the outputs of an experiment to model usersʼ work activities in a smart home. The experiment was conducted among 254 respondents, who were asked to explore a smart home in a virtual environment and then to arrange their daily activities including work related activities in the virtual smart home. A choice modeling approach, based on the Multinomial Logit Model (MNL), is applied to model how an individual works at a smart home given influential factors such as the individualsʼ socio-demographic profile and their current lifestyle. Two features of working in a smart home are covered in this paper, namely, “the integration of work activities with other daily activities” and “the location of work activities in the house”. The results give better insight into the future trends of working at home and the effects of smart homes on working behavior of people. The results can be used in further developments of both smart homes and teleworking.