Smart home technologies need adjustment for autistic children’s needs
Making Smart Homes Fit for Autistic Children: Family Work and Monitored Independence
Human-Computer InteractionArtificial Intelligence
Summary
Smart home devices are common in many homes, but they don’t always work well for children with autism and their families. The authors studied how families use, change, and manage these technologies to help their autistic children while facing challenges like sensory overload and unclear device behavior. They also found that parents balance safety, privacy, and independence by monitoring their children remotely. The authors introduce new ideas to better understand how technology fits into family life and suggest ways to improve device design.
What this means in practice
- •For smart home product designers: Design adjustable interaction features and clearer failure recovery for devices used by families with autistic children to improve usability and support.$Commercial implications: Enables development of specialized smart home products that better serve autistic families, expanding market reach and user satisfaction.
- •For home health technology developers: Create remote monitoring tools that balance child safety with privacy and family control, aiding conditional independence for autistic children.$Commercial implications: Supports new health monitoring services tailored for families managing autism, addressing privacy and control concerns.
Authors
Tingting Xiang, Weihan Jiang, Hrishitva Patel, Haiqi Shen, Tianzhi He, Kyrie Zhou
Abstract
General-purpose smart-home technologies are increasingly present in family life, yet how they support or disrupt autistic children and families with autistic children remains underexamined. We conducted a multi-source qualitative study drawing on five caregiver interviews, Xiaohongshu (also known internationally as RedNote) posts explicitly situated in autism contexts, and contextual posts from Xiaohongshu and Weibo. We find that families create support for autistic children by adapting environmental outputs, prompts, and interaction channels, while sensory intensity, communicative rules, and opaque operating states can turn the same technologies into barriers. Support also depends on continuing family work, including translation, configuration, modification, maintenance, and boundary-setting. Remote monitoring enables conditional independence while generating tensions among safety, privacy, and control. We contribute three concepts, including relational fit, family work as support infrastructure, and monitored independence, for understanding accessible domestic technology. We derive design implications for adjustable interaction, legible and recoverable failure, lower-burden configuration, and negotiable monitoring.