Whether they’re turning on your lights and appliances remotely, monitoring and changing your thermostat’s settings, or even helping you track your fitness goals, smart devices are changing the way we live. But with so many gadgets claiming to be’smart’, how do you know you’re getting the best product for your money? Before buying, be sure to read the privacy statement, service agreement and terms of use — not everyone wants to do this, but it can make all the difference in how your data is collected, stored and used.
A device can be considered a smart device if it has three main features: context awareness, autonomous computing and connectivity (Ray, 2016). This study explores the key features that are directly or indirectly related to these concepts. For this purpose, a systematic literature review was conducted.
Smart devices include sensors to sense environmental context, expanded memory and processors to multitask, wireless protocols for communications, and software to process this data. They can also use artificial intelligence to learn user patterns and customize their responses and functions accordingly.
While some authors include mobility in the concept of’smart devices’, we chose not to do so since it would discard smart devices that have all other functionalities but are not mobile. For example, a smart board (Malkawi, 2017) is an electronic whiteboard that allows distinct users to navigate the web and perform different applications such as visualising text, images, augio and video. This is a good example of how the technology can be applied in educational environments.