sensor equipment unsupervised, on
any device, in different rooms of their
home. It can be quite uncomfortable,
even with explicit consent, to have such
freedom in a stranger’s home—to enter
unfamiliar rooms and touch personal
possessions (if your deployment
requires this). Naturally, it is important
to ensure your deployment does not
disrupt too much of the participant’s
day, but it is equally important to feel
comfortable and confident in your
surroundings when carrying out the
deployment. It’s crucial to note that
participants may lack the time or
capacity to accompany researchers
while deploying equipment, but it
may be worth discussing with the
participant the prospect of their
Participants are going out on a limb:
Without necessarily knowing you, they
trust you to be ethical, knowledgeable,
and professional while in their homes
and in your analysis of their data. From
our experience, deployments worked
best when participants and researchers
worked together to set up deployments.

When the researchers were accompanied by participants, it was easier to navigate different rooms and collectively identify devices and areas to monitor. In some cases, participants insisted that researchers set up the

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manuscript,
visit tsc.acm.org

ACM Transactions on Social Computing

ACM TSC seeks to publish work that covers the full spectrum of social computing including theoretical, empirical, systems, and design research contributions.

TSC welcomes research employing a wide range of methods to advance the tools, techniques, understanding, and practice of social computing, particularly research that designs, implements or studies systems that mediate social interactions among users, or that develops theory or techniques for application in those systems.

Researcher setting up the monitoring of a router and logging machine in a home.

The reality of in-the-wild setups.