Smart Devices Require Skilled Users: Home Automation Performance Tests among the Dutch Population

The benefits obtained from home automation are promising and will become more pronounced as smart home technologies continue to develop. To achieve benefits, users require operational, data, and strategic skills to control and automate smart devices, retrieve and understand collected data, and make informed decisions. These skills were tested by providing assignments in a virtual test environment to 100 Dutch adult participants. The assignments were designed to measure different facets of all skills by using the functions, data, and automations of smart home devices. The results suggest that the Dutch adult population is not sufficiently skilled in using the smart home to its full potential; several skills related problems occurred in the tests. Furthermore, in terms of gender, age, and education, home automation further reinforces existing social-digital inequalities. Thus, earlier digital inequalities will remain present for some time, despite increasing device autonomy.