Consumers' attitudes toward and intentions to adopt smart home technologies

Abstract

Smart homes embrace different smart home technologies (SHT) to offer various services to fulfill their users’ needs and wants. They are one of the key enablers of smart living. Conversely, SHT penetration is still growing slowly compared to its potential benefits. Thus, this dissertation proposes a diffusion of innovation (DOI) based integrated research model for understanding consumers’ attitudes toward and intentions to adopt smart home technologies, through subjective perceptions of the innovation characteristics. For this purpose, the existing literature on technology adoption and smart homes is examined and innovation characteristics are complemented with the contextual factors extracted from 13 expert interviews. The final research model is tested with the data collected from 995 individuals via a face to-face survey. During the analysis, consumers are clustered into meaningful segments regarding their technology-related traits stemming from the technology readiness index (TRI) 2.0, and smart home adoption determinants are explored for these consumer segments to reveal segment-based distinctions. Additionally, differences in SHT adoption are investigated based on lifestyle attributes-based consumer segments, demographics, socioeconomics, prior experience, and housing structure. This research contributes to understanding the adoption of innovations in the consumer behavior context.