**6. Conclusions for adoption and acceptability of the smart home**

The aims of this project were to investigate smart home adoption from a sociotechnical perspective that holds that people and the technologies they use are "co-constitutive" [12]. To this end, we qualitatively interrogated the survey findings pertaining to the most significant factors affecting smart home adoption, as previously flagged up quantitatively in [3]. Our objective was to understand how industry stakeholders interpret and influence smart home's development in the UK and respond to the socio-technical challenges that smart home adoption flags up. The following findings reflect the different levels of interpretive flexibility regarding the challenges of smart home adoption


Overall, the smart home industry is responding to the smart home adoption challenges by providing new technical solutions to mitigate the privacy and security risk of smart homes, producing new standards and influencing regulation and building up communities of learning. These findings reveal that there is awareness in the industry of the need to improve sector practices by mitigating privacy and security risks of smart homes in order to increase consumers' trust and promote sector growth.

In terms of implications for the management of smart home adoption, this stakeholders' picture of smart home adoption in the UK and worldwide may help influence future business models and regulatory frameworks. Our study contributes to building awareness of obstacles to adoption and of ethics of data so that new, adaptable, and ethical business models can be proposed; policymaking by providing evidence of stakeholders' opinions toward regulation for common security or data interchange standards. With this knowledge, an open challenge for the smart home is the ethical concerns it may raise, in regard, among other things, cybersecurity. Hence future directions for this work may include the identification and specification of ethical principles relevant to assessing the ethical impact of the smart home and steps that can be taken toward increasing smart home acceptability—that is, the ethical and instrumental desirability for consumers of adopting new technologies.

The study has some limitations that can provide avenues for further research. We strived to achieve a balance of businesses and NGOs in our sample, and included one SME among the business respondents quota. Despite efforts taken to ensure a balanced sample, the small number of interview participants may still introduce bias in the results. Hence, to improve the approach taken in this work, the sample size could be increased in order to include: (1) a higher number of SMEs as these provide new ideas for products and services which can disrupt the sector's business models yet can also exacerbate security and privacy risks; also, this work does not address the voice of non-Western organizations involved in the development and management of the smart home. Hence future work could include the voice of more non-Western organizations to balance and achieve a more culturally diverse sample on the cybersecurity of the smart home. Of particular importance would be to also include representatives from developing countries, for whom the cybersecurity challenges of the smart home will be no less prominent, if not more, in the years to come.

*How Is the Internet of Things Industry Responding to the Cybersecurity Challenges of the Smart… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106012*
