Like a Family Member Who Takes Care of Me” – Users’ Anthropomorphic Representations and Trustworthiness of Smart Home Environments

Within the last years the concept of trust has attracted increasedattention in the field of smart home environments. However,little is known about what determines trustworthiness in this context. For thisreason the objective was to examine mental models in terms ofanthropomorphic perception ofsmart home environments and itsrelation to trustworthiness. Two studies (N=36) were carried out in the Future Care Lab, a simulated intelligent home environment. We used the teach-back method to help participants to talk about the smart home environment technology and asked to generate a metaphorof an experienced home-monitoring scenario. Finally,we applied linguistic analysis of responsesto detect anthropomorphic characteristics. In general, results demonstrate inspiring metaphorsrelated to the personal assistance system, e.g.  “like anairbag...” or “like a family member...”, which might be useful forfuture interface designs and approachesof communication in the context of smart home environments. However,no relation of anthropomorphism and trustworthiness could be found. Therefore,we suggest an anthropomorphic threshold, which should be investigated by using an improved method and trustscale.