Timing Matters: Enhancing User Experience through Temporal Prediction in Smart Homes

The proliferation of IoT devices generates vast interaction data, offering insights into user behaviour. While prior work predicts what actions users perform, the timing of these actions – critical for enabling proactive and efficient smart systems – remains relatively underexplored. Addressing this gap, we focus on predicting the time of the next user action in smart environments. Due to the lack of public datasets with fine-grained timestamps suitable for this task and associated privacy concerns, we contribute a dataset of 11.6k sequences synthesized based on human annotations of interaction patterns, pairing actions with precise timestamps. To this end, we introduce Timing-Matters, a Transformer-Encoder based method that predicts action timing, achieving 38.30% accuracy on the synthesized dataset, outperforming the best baseline by 6%, and showing 1–6% improvements on other open datasets. Our code and dataset will be publicly released.