Assisting Inhabitants of Residential Homes with Management of Their Energy Consumption

Abstract

Although there are already a range of energy monitoring and automation systems available in the market that target residential homes, mostly with the aim of reducing their total energy consumption, very few of these systems are directly concerned with how those energy savings are actually made. As such, these systems do not provide tools that would allow users to make intelligent decisions about their energy usage strategies, and encourage them to change their energy use behaviour. In this paper we describe a system designed to facilitate planning and control of energy usage activities in residential homes. We also report on a user study of this system which demonstrates its potential for making energy savings possible.

Fostering smart energy applications through advanced visual interfaces

“…Examples of these technologies include tools and services such as public displays [8,1], dashboards [6,2], and virtual environment [3,7] to increase energy-awareness, all kinds of mobile apps for remote energy monitoring and control [5], web-portals to share energy consumption data [4], simulation tools for energy efficient design such as zero-energy buildings, and tools that assist in grid planning tasks. Many of these rely on large collections of data (such as energy consumption data and environmental parameters) and therefore require (or at least could be improved by) using advanced interaction and interface technology to allow smart visual data exploration.…”