Embracing the Smart-Home Revolution in Asia by the Elderly: An End-User Negative Perception Modeling

Abstract

There has been a rapid growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) enabled smart-homes recently. Although these IoT powered smart-homes offer new opportunities, their household penetration is quite low. The main objective of this paper is to develop a better understanding of the reasons underlying the end-user resistance to the adoption of the IoT enabled smart-homes, with elderly people as the target population. Due to a rapid increase in the worldwide elderly population, various forms of information and communication technology (ICT) services are used for their well-being, and hence the target of this paper. A very few research has focused on the end-user experience of using smart-homes with all of them using an acceptance-based approach. Using different negative-perception modeling, we try to identify the main barriers to smart-home usage by the elderly people. Accordingly, an online survey was conducted with 254 elderly people across four Asian countries. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test our theoretical model having ten constructs. Two constructs (perceived-uselessness and self-efficacy) were found to be non-significant, while the remaining proved to be significant (innovativeness, perceived-reliability, perceived-interoperability, service-cost, privacy-concern, psychological-barrier, home administrative policy, and government-policy). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research studying the IoT enabled smart-homes using a resistive approach and should provide the groundwork for further research in user-experience studies with IoT technology.