Interpersonal Violence and Abuse in Smart Homes: A Systematic Mapping Study

Smart homes are increasingly common in everyday life, offering convenience, automation, energy efficiency, and enhanced security through software services and devices such as smart locks, cameras, and voice assistants. However, their connected and shared nature introduces risks within close relationships, where they can be exploited to facilitate interpersonal violence and abuse. At the same time, they can also be leveraged for mitigation, detection, and victim support. In this study, we conduct a systematic mapping review of 27 studies to identify and categorize how smart home systems can both facilitate and address interpersonal violence and abuse. The findings show that research in this field is imbalanced, with most studies focusing on abuse facilitation, particularly through surveillance, remote control, and access misuse, while fewer studies propose mechanisms for abuse detection and victim support. This suggests a need for more holistic, smart home system-integrated approaches that explicitly address interpersonal risks in smart home design and development, and integrate these concerns into core software engineering activities, including requirements engineering, system design, and validation.