Minding the Gap: Reconciling Human and Technical Perspectives on the IoT for Healthy Ageing

Figure 1

The diagram above from [6] is a modified version of Atzori et al.’s IoT [7]. Atzori et al.’s IoT consisted of the triad of things, web connectivity, and semantic reasoning. Soro et al.’s framework [6] replaced semantic reasoning with people. A human-computer interaction critique notes that, in the end, it will always be people to make sense of data and interpret things and their displays, even if things can communicate and reason with each other. Thus, semantic reasoning is subsumed under “things,” and “people” take their place in the triad. This emphasizes the fact that the IoT is used by people and the human-machine interface cannot be ignored in its conceptualization.