Explaining AI Decisions: Towards Achieving Human-Centered Explainability in Smart Home Environments

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of human-centered explainability in AI-powered smart home systems, reviewing current XAI methods and demonstrating the need for user-friendly explanations through experiments and HCI methodologies.

Contribution

It advocates for human-centric XAI approaches in smart homes, highlighting the limitations of existing methods and proposing user-focused explanation techniques for better user understanding and trust.

Findings

Current XAI methods may not effectively aid user understanding.

User-centered explanations improve decision-making in smart home contexts.

HCI methodologies can enhance explanation presentation and usability.

Abstract

Smart home systems are gaining popularity as homeowners strive to enhance their living and working environments while minimizing energy consumption. However, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled decision-making models in smart home systems faces challenges due to the complexity and black-box nature of these systems, leading to concerns about explainability, trust, transparency, accountability, and fairness. The emerging field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) addresses these issues by providing explanations for the models' decisions and actions. While state-of-the-art XAI methods are beneficial for AI developers and practitioners, they may not be easily understood by general users, particularly household members. This paper advocates for human-centered XAI methods, emphasizing the importance of delivering readily comprehensible explanations to enhance user satisfaction and drive the adoption of smart home systems. We review state-of-the-art XAI methods and prior studies focusing on human-centered explanations for general users in the context of smart home applications. Through experiments on two smart home application scenarios, we demonstrate that explanations generated by prominent XAI techniques might not be effective in helping users understand and make decisions. We thus argue for the necessity of a human-centric approach in representing explanations in smart home systems and highlight relevant human-computer interaction (HCI) methodologies, including user studies, prototyping, technology probes analysis, and heuristic evaluation, that can be employed to generate and present human-centered explanations to users.