Smart Homes and Families to Enable Sustainable Societies: A Data-Driven Approach for Multi-Perspective Parameter Discovery Using BERT Modelling

Homes are the building block of cities and societies and therefore smart homes are critical to establishing smart living and are expected to play a key role in enabling smart, sustainable cities and societies. The current literature on smart homes has mainly focused on developing smart functions for homes such as security and ambiance management. Homes are composed of families and are inherently complex phenomena underlined by humans and their relationships with each other, subject to individual, intragroup, intergroup, and intercommunity goals. There is a clear need to understand, define, consolidate existing research, and actualize the overarching roles of smart homes, and the roles of smart homes that will serve the needs of future smart cities and societies. This paper introduces our data-driven parameter discovery methodology and uses it to provide, for the first time, an extensive, fairly comprehensive, analysis of the families and homes landscape seen through the eyes of academics and the public, using over a hundred thousand research papers and nearly a million tweets. We developed a methodology using deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), and big data analytics methods (BERT and other machine learning methods) and applied it to automatically discover parameters that capture a comprehensive knowledge and design space of smart families and homes comprising social, political, economic, environmental, and other dimensions. The 66 discovered parameters and the knowledge space comprising 100 s of dimensions are explained by reviewing and referencing over 300 articles from the academic literature and tweets. The knowledge and parameters discovered in this paper can be used to develop a holistic understanding of matters related to families and homes facilitating the development of better, community-specific policies, technologies, solutions, and industries for families and homes, leading to strengthening families and homes, and in turn, empowering sustainable societies across the globe.

Automated summary

Smart homes play a critical role in establishing smart living and enabling sustainable cities and societies. However, current research on smart homes mainly focuses on developing specific functions, such as security and ambiance management, while the understanding of families and their complex dynamics is still limited. This paper introduces a data-driven parameter discovery methodology and provides a comprehensive analysis of the families and homes landscape using academic literature and public opinions from social media. Through deep learning and natural language processing, the paper discovers 66 parameters and a multidimensional knowledge space, which can contribute to the development of community-specific policies, technologies, and solutions for enhancing families and homes, ultimately leading to empowered and sustainable societies globally.