Organizations: Chongqing Jiaotong University, China · Independent Researcher, USA · University of Texas at San Antonio, USA · Shanghai AI Laboratory, China
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.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Graphical abstract of how general-purpose smart-home technologies become supportive for autistic children and their families. Graphical abstract summarizing the study's conceptual findings. An everyday smart-home context containing an autistic child, caregiver, and connected devices leads to a central relational-fit framework linking child characteristics, device behavior, and family arrangements. When these elements align, smart-home technologies can support regulation, participation, and communication; when they do not align, they can contribute to sensory distress, failed interactions, and difficulties understanding device states. A family-work panel shows caregivers translating, configuring, modifying, maintaining, and setting boundaries around technologies in order to create or restore fit. A monitored-independence panel shows a caregiver remotely connected to a child at home, illustrating how smart-home monitoring can enable greater separation while maintaining visibility and contact, with ongoing tensions among safety, privacy, and control. A final design-implications panel highlights adjustable interaction, recoverable failure, lower-burden configuration, and negotiable monitoring.
Figure 2. Multi-source study design and analytic synthesis. Caregiver interviews, Xiaohongshu posts, and Weibo posts were analyzed separately to produce source-specific theme sets. Interview and autism-context Xiaohongshu evidence formed the core cross-source comparison. General-family or adjacent Xiaohongshu evidence and Weibo evidence provided supplementary contextual checks. The comparison examined convergence, complementarity, differences and tensions, source-specific patterns, and counterexamples and boundaries, informing integrated findings about conditions and mechanisms. A left-to-right flow diagram. Caregiver interviews, Xiaohongshu posts, and Weibo posts each point to an Analyze separately box containing the steps segment, code, consolidate, develop, and review themes. The analysis produces separate interview, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo theme sets. Interview and Xiaohongshu theme sets point to a Compare themes box containing map relationships and trace boundaries; the Weibo theme set remains visually separate to indicate its supplementary contextual role. The comparison leads to cross-source relationships comprising convergence, complementarity, differences and tensions, source-specific patterns, and counterexamples and boundaries, followed by integrated findings about conditions and mechanisms.
Table 1. Participant and interview characteristics.
Source
Participant / material context
Included material
Evidentiary role
Key boundary
Caregiver interviews
Female caregivers of autistic children aged 8–11
5 caregivers
Core explanatory Family decisions, technology adjustments, and negotiation
Caregiver accounts; children were not directly interviewed
Rednote
Retained personal-experience posts from autism- and smart-home-related searches
76 posts
Core naturalistic When the ASD context was explicit; otherwise adjacent or general-family context
Not all posts explicitly identified an ASD context; diagnoses were not clinically verified
Weibo
Personal or family-interaction posts in general child-raising contexts
245 posts
Supplementary comparison Family interactions, maintenance, and device failures
Cannot independently support conclusions about autism
Table 2. Study materials, participant context, and evidentiary roles.
Figure 3. A conceptual model of relational fit, family work, and monitored independence in general-purpose smart homes for autistic children. A conceptual model showing how smart-home technology characteristics interact with a child's characteristics and needs to produce relational fit or misfit. Ongoing family work shapes and sustains this relationship, which influences everyday outcomes and monitored independence.
Adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are increasingly transitioning from family homes towards semi-inde-pendent living. As parents hand off the role of primary caregiver, they face numerous challenges in arranging consistent and quality support. Our research centers on understanding these caregiving routines. By focusing on the unique lived experience of parents, who possess extensive explicit and tacit knowledge of their adult child's requirements, we aim to map the management of care they provide. This foundational understanding is essential to identifying how assistive technologies can effectively serve a key role in supporting adults with IDD in this transition. In this work, we interviewed 16 parents of adults with IDD beginning this transition to understand: 1) how they currently provide support for daily living and what makes their support effective; 2) what their experiences and perceptions are regarding the use of technology; and 3) how they envision assistive technology successfully integrating with their adult child's new home or with other supports to promote independence. Our thematic analysis produced four themes: common modes of support, inside the routine to support growth, the fragility of continuity of care across transitions, and participants' perceptions and experiences of assistive technology. Building on these findings, we derive four design principles for growth-oriented assistive technology. These include pre-transition onboarding to capture caregiver tacit knowledge; structured scaffolding towards long-term growth; adaptive sensing that responds to day-to-day variability; and customization for the individual balanced with consistency for the care network.
Alexander Tyshka, Andrea Macklem-Zabel, Absalat Getachew +2
The sense of family connectedness may support positive outcomes including individual well-being, resilience, and healthy family functioning. However, as technologies advance, they often replace human-human interactions instead of nurturing them. In this work, we investigate how robot-facilitated communication tools might instead create new opportunities for family connection. We conducted two studies with families with children aged 5-12. We first explored the design space through in-home technology probe sessions with six families. These probes inspired us to explore two key interaction design dimensions: the robot's behavior strategy (passive, reactive, proactive) and the mode of communication (synchronous, asynchronous). We then conducted a laboratory study with 20 families to examine how the two dimensions shaped parent-child interaction and connection. Our findings characterize how parents and children appropriated robot-mediated exchanges, the tensions they experienced around initiative, timing, and privacy, and the opportunities they envisioned for supporting everyday connectedness.
Michael F Xu, Bengisu Cagiltay, Yaxin Hu +2
University of Wisconsin–Madison Madison, USA · Koç University Istanbul, Türkiye · Simon Fraser University Burnaby, Canada
Domestic voice assistants and smart-home devices are increasingly embedded in everyday routines, yet their ethics are often treated as an afterthought or delegated to compliance teams. To explore how expectations about smart-home AI are constructed and managed, we conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with designers, developers, and researchers from major smart-home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Azure IoT, and Google Nest). Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we develop Expectations Management (EM): a culturally embedded model describing how practitioners shape, calibrate, and repair expectations by balancing organisational rights with culturally situated rites. We show that EM differs from expectation-confirmation theory and trust-calibration by foregrounding moral judgement, situated action, and cross-cultural variation. Our analysis reveals four recurring design tensions: automation vs. autonomy, helpfulness vs. intrusiveness, personalisation vs. predictability, and transparency vs. obscurity and distils them into a five-phase EM Design Playbook that supports moral prudence. We discuss implications for responsible smart-home design and offer guidance for human-centred AI.
Varad Vishwarupe, Ivan Flechais, Marina Jirotka +1
¹ Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford · ² Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford