The thesis is organized as follows. Within this Introduction, we discuss problem definition that drives this study, investigate related work in the field using a systematic literature re-view method and summarized into two areas: Home Automation System (HAS) and User Context. The chapter entitled “Research Methodology” describes the scientific method-ology this study has been followed. An overall integration architecture and the features of heuristic evaluation are presented as Research Results. Summary of research findings and future work are discussed, and finally, a conclusion is drawn in the last chapter.
Learning the background work in the field is essential for quality findings, the authors follow a systematic literature review methodology to search, select and analyze related papers, journals to form an overall view on concerned matters. (Klimova, 2018) has pre-sented a well-organized literature review which enhances searching quality by focusing on content and relations between topics of interest. The two well-evolved fields of re-search: home automation and user context are of primary benefits. This study tries to form strong understanding in the impact of user context, or user behavior in the context of home automation and how beneficial extracted knowledge could be utilized in the quest to improve HAS efficiency, thus, contribute to the advancement in Home Automation (HA) social adaption.
2.1 Search Strategy
The process of data selection includes a periodic search for articles. We used the follow-ing terms as searched keywords: User Context, Home/House Automation, Smart Home, Context-aware in the renowned scientific databases: ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Springer.
A large number of results returned indicate the popularity in the fields and also implied that the keywords we used might be too broadly linked. To this end, compositions have been applied to connect keywords (e.g., AND) as a mean to filter related results as well as to point the search focus to relations between keywords. Other journal databases: ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, Taylor & Francis Online, and Cambridge Core were also used to fulfill the necessary materials for reviewing.
Table 2describes the details of the literature review process. This includes the following information: task description, an objective of each task and specific activities to achieve these objectives. The outcome of this process is a list of what we believe to be relevant and can be leveraged to build a foundation for our research.
Table 2:Details of the literature review method.
Task Objective Activities
Keywords search To find all relevant articles • Extracted keywords relevant to research goals: “user context” in “home automa-tion” system.
• Searched in different databases and skimmed through returned results.
Combine keywords To filter closely related and useful articles in the context of this research
• Leveraged advanced search features in scientific databases: conditions on key-words, compositions.
Inclusion and ex-clusion criteria
To define the scope to later select articles as we are in-terested in more recent find-ings
• Selected results writeen in English and from 2010 with high impact factor and published in top conferences.
• Scanned article’s content, including ab-stract, keywords and marked good items for analysis. This task is done with the help of Mendeley tool.
• Looked for full-text documents to sup-port further reading.
Quality assessment To select relevant articles capable of addressing the research questions
• Looked into the content of articles and cross-referenced to detect additional rele-vant papers (or keywords).
• Eliminated duplicated and irrelevant studies.
• Enriched the literature collections for any new relevant keywords found and discussed to finalize results for next step.
Searching for “Home Automation” alone returned more than 20.000 results (ScienceDi-rect) and same observation applied to “User Context”. This incident is not surprising, although both research fields are not new, the attention has never dropped, especially in studies towards conserving energy and consciousness in consuming energy, which is covered in the theme of sustainable development. Due to the nature of this study, we only look into the intersection where “user context” meets “home automation” that can enhance the efficiency of HAS.
To enhance the diversity of related articles, we conducted searching in different sources of data, specifically, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, Springer Link, and Emerald Insight, these
are the most famous scientific databases with thousands of articles, conference papers, etc.. A final list of keywords have been gathered (Table 3a) from research goal analysis and extended during cross-referenced article scanning. Total number of articles found in each database is summarized inTable 3b.
Table 3:Chosen keywords and search results from different sources of data.
Keywords ScienceDirect IEEE Xplore Springer Link Emerald Insight
(1)(2|3) 2007 8771 5363 4533
(2|3)(4) 963 60 511 184
(2|3)(7) 1485 279 1246 570
(1)(2|3)(5) 808 191 808 381
(1)(2|3)(6) 300 348 588 405
(b)Search results in different database.
From the result pools, we have selected 91 articles in total, including related papers, cross-reference and existing work from the similar topic, to further analyze. Searching from different scientific database covers larger range of possible articles, however, it comes with the cost of an immense amount of returned matches. Inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied to filter the results. Summary of conditions used to select articles is explained inTable 4.
Selected papers for further studying fit into three main groups: study in definition, archi-tectural aspects, role of HAS in energy management (44%); user context and impact of user behavior in HAS (19%); and research in the field of context recognition within home automation environment (26%). Furthermore, this study aims to explore external dimen-sions of user context at a higher level which is closely related to user data and looking for an effective way to integrate such context data into HAS. Thus, we also investigate modern HAS platforms in its user context enabler aspect. The rest of the selected articles relates to design science research methodology, doing literature review and sustainability analysis. In the following section, we present findings among those categories of interest.
Table 4:Inclusion/Exclusion criteria for articles searching
Inclusion Exclusion
Most recent published: 2008-2018 Non-academic resources (e.g., magazine reports, book chapters, blog) Journals/papers in English only Other languages than English
Highly ranked conference User context appearing in other unrelated fields of research High impact factor: >=1.0 Not closely related to Home Automation System
Computer science or ICT related fields