Apples vs. Oranges: The QoE Scenario in Consumer IoT Services

IoT services are being deployed in a variety of contexts ranging from smart-homes, smart-cities, smart-healthcare, smart-transportation to smart-industry. Traditionally, Quality of Experience (QoE) that typically measures the end-users' satisfaction level with a particular service has been associated with multimedia services. In this article, we present how IoT services are unique, and why the traditional way of QoE evaluation is not a good approach in this changing scenario. There must be a paradigm shift from a user-centric approach as currently followed, to an approach that combines human to machine (H2M), and machine to machine (M2M) communications. We present a conceptual approach towards such a shift. For the consumer electronics (CE) community this article sheds light on the future research directions in evaluating the QoE for various consumer IoT services.