Abstract
Smart homes are increasingly adopted to enhance the quality of people's lives by bringing many benefits, such as energy savings, convenience, and increased security, especially empowering individuals with vulnerabilities. However, the adoption of smart homes also poses challenges for vulnerable people due to the increased complexity of living environments, introducing uncertainty, and potentially exacerbating their vulnerabilities. Given the potential misalignment between expected perceptions before and actual perceptions after the adoption of smart homes by vulnerable people, this development paper explores, through the lens of affordances and cognitive dissonance theory, how individuals with vulnerabilities can reach the full potential of smart home adoption and what factors influence their ability to leverage smart home technologies. The study contributes to both information systems management and inclusion literature, specifically regarding vulnerable individuals as a marginalized group in smart home device adoption.