Experimental Prototype

Crowdsourced IoT Products Dissecting

(2019)

OLYMPUS Platform IoT Analysis Open-Source Tools Peer Learning Collaborative Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Software Engineering (SE) Education (E)

Computing devices such as laptops, tablets, and mobile phones have become part of daily life, and end users increasingly understand how these devices are built and can make informed decisions between them. The same is not yet true for Internet of Things products. Because the IoT marketplace is still emerging, consumers often have little understanding of the trade-offs designers make regarding connectivity, sensing, data handling, and privacy. To address this gap, this project created OLYMPUS, an open-source crowdsourced peer-learning platform that guides learners to systematically inspect commercial IoT products, reason about their architecture and design decisions, and engage in structured discussion with peers. The platform encourages collaborative analysis where participants dissect products across multiple dimensions including hardware components, communication protocols, data flows, and user interaction models.

The approach was validated through two user studies demonstrating that the activity promotes deeper thinking about IoT ecosystems. Participants surfaced design considerations that they would otherwise have overlooked, showing that structured peer analysis leads to richer understanding of how connected products are built and how they handle user data.

OLYMPUS is open source and available for the educational community to reuse, adapt, and extend. It provides a scalable method for building IoT literacy among students and practitioners who are new to the connected-device landscape, enabling educators worldwide to incorporate structured IoT product analysis into their curricula.