Towards User-Centric Smart Homes for Older Adults: Investigating Technology Acceptance, Ethical Concerns, and Adoption Challenges

As the aging population grows rapidly, the need for smart home technology designed to assist the elderly in their daily lives, health care, and their overall quality of life is becoming more apparent. Although smart home systems have undergone remarkable technological developments, their use is still constrained in the face of concerns over usability, privacy, security, ethical issues, cost, and digital literacy. This paper is a user-centric study on the adoption of smart home that considers Technology Acceptance, ethical issues, and adoption issues related to older people. A thorough literature review is carried out to discover the main elements that affect the acceptance of the users and to analyze the existing smart home solutions. Moreover, a framework called User-Centric Smart Home Adoption Assessment (UCSHAA) is suggested, which assesses technology acceptance, ethical compliance, usability, privacy, and overall technology readiness for adoption. Examples of comparative analysis show that incorporating the principles of user centered design with the consideration of ethics can enhance trust, accessibility and adoption potential. The results offer guidance to researchers, developers, healthcare and policy makers in designing secure, ethical and user-friendly environments for the smart home to support healthy and independent aging. Future studies will aim at validating the proposed framework through large-scale studies in the real user environment.