System initiative visibility and explanatory support depth shape older adults’ trust and decision acceptance in smart homes

As smart homes become more autonomous, older adults may experience uncertainty when system actions occur without clear cues about what changed, whether the system initiated the action, and whether intervention remains possible. Although transparency and explanation are often proposed as remedies, less is known about how action visibility and explanatory information work together for older users. This study used a 2 × 3 between-subjects experiment with 96 older adults to test two interface-communication factors: system initiative visibility, defined as whether the interface explicitly signals that the smart-home system has initiated an action, and explanatory support depth, defined as the amount of rationale provided for that action.

The outcome variables included understandability, trust, perceived control, technology anxiety, decision acceptance rate, and response time. Participants completed system-initiated smart-home tasks; their subjective ratings, decision acceptance, and response time were recorded. Higher system initiative visibility was associated with higher understandability, trust, perceived control, and decision acceptance, as well as lower response time and technology anxiety.

Explanatory support depth showed more selective effects, with moderate explanation generally producing the most balanced pattern across trust, decision acceptance, and response efficiency, whereas detailed explanation did not consistently provide additional benefit. Interaction patterns for trust, and more cautiously for decision acceptance, suggest that explanation may partly compensate when system initiative cues are weak. Overall, the findings provide preliminary support for a bounded semantic compensation account and suggest that autonomous smart-home interfaces for older adults should prioritize clear system-action cues with concise, layered explanations.

This work was supported and funded by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2023YFD2201500). Furniture Institute, Central South University of Forestry and Technology, Changsha, 410004, China Mingzhu Li, Junjie Shu, Xingyan Chen, Wuyi Qiang & Tao Tao Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China Zhejiang University Hangzhou, 310027, Zhejiang, China The authors declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it.

The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.