Social Impact of Smart Environments: Software Engineering Perspectives and Challenges

This article examines the impact of smart environments on society from a software engineering design perspective. Smart environments create significant design challenges due to their scalability, interconnectedness, and adaptivity of devices. Software engineering and existing standards typically address technical issues, while ethical and social issues have been neglected. This work argues that changing regulatory requirements shifts the responsibility for outcomes to the software engineering team, and therefore the definition of adequate guidelines is needed. These guidelines include consideration of ethical issues, harmonized ethically informed standards, principles that address compliance risks, and analyses of social impact. Our starting point is the seven harmonized standards defined by the European GDPR. Based on the existing literature and additional analyses, we identify ten key ethical issues, nine compliance risks, and twelve analyses of societal impact. These standards, issues, risks, and analyses make a starting point for the development of formal guidelines applicable to socially aware smart environment design.