Perceived Barriers to Consumer Acceptance of Smart Homes in The Finnish Market

Abstract

The objectives of this thesis are to discover the Finnish consumers’ perception of smart homes, the predictors of use intention of smart homes and the acceptance barriers of smart homes among all participants and different subgroups.

Finland was discovered to be lagging behind in smart home adoption compared to other Nordic countries, and this thesis aimed to investigate which perceptions may be holding back Finnish consumers from adopting smart homes. The objectives are reached with a factor analysis, reliability and validity analysis and regression analyses. This study is conducted as a replication study of the research by Park et al. (2018) with the same hypotheses to be tested.

There are three main findings in this thesis. First, smart homes are perceived as easy to use, enjoyable and useful, but expensive, insecure as well as moderately unreliable and incompatible with people’s lifestyles. Second, use intention is strongly impacted by attitude, perceived usefulness and compatibility, of which attitude is highly motivated by perceived usefulness and ease of use while perceived usefulness is motivated mainly by compatibility and perceived system reliability. Third, acceptance barriers for all participants comprise of perceived unreliability and insecurity, while the older, female, less knowledgeable and less experienced groups introduced more barriers (incompatibility, lack of enjoyment, perceived difficulty of use, perceived high cost and perceived uselessness). The acceptance barriers are suggested as points of improvement in order to accelerate smart home adoption in the Finnish market.