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- HomeTree: an art inspired mobile eco-feedback visualizationPublication . Quintal, Filipe; Nisi, Valentina; Nunes, Nuno; Barreto, Mary; Pereira, LucasThis paper presents HomeTree a prototype of an art-inspired mobile eco feedback system. The system is implemented on a tablet PC and relies on a non intrusive energy-monitoring infrastructure to access consumption and power event information. Our prototype addresses an important problem in eco feedback, which is the fact that users loose interest about their energy consump tion after a period of several weeks. To accomplish this HomeTree implements a dual visualization strategy. Initially HomeTree presents users with a screensa ver that shows energy consumption mapped in a dynamic illustration of the lo cal forest. Through this strategy we leverage the emotional connection between the short-term energy consumption and the long-term effects on nature through the local depicted landscape. In a second mode of operation users can interact with HomeTree directly by checking the historical records of their consumption data, and check which days or weeks they have reduced or increased consump tion. Furthermore a comparison with a more objective baseline, such as the city of Funchal energy consumption is provided, in order to give users a sense of the level of their consumption in a wider context.
- Towards using Low-Cost Opportunistic Energy Sensing for Promoting Energy ConservationPublication . Nunes, Nuno J.; Pereira, Lucas; Nisi, ValentinaThis position paper discusses how to leverage low-cost energy sensing to opportunistically develop activity-based approaches to energy conservation. Based on our extensive experience developing low-cost sensing infrastructures and long term deployment of ecofeedback systems, we discuss the possibility of unobtrusively inferring domestic activities from the overall aggregated energy consumption of households. We then postulate how the combination of this information with daily household activities could lead to more effective and meaningful ways to re-aggregate residential energy consumption for the purpose of ecofeedback. Here we briefly present a practical approach towards this new research direction that leverages HCI related methods, in particular using the day reconstruction method to provide semi-supervised approaches for automatic detection of household activities.
- What-a-Watt: exploring electricity production literacy through a long term eco-feedback studyPublication . Quintal, Filipe; Pereira, Lucas; Nunes, Nuno J.; Nisi, ValentinaThis paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of an eco-feedback system capable of providing detailed household consumption information and also real-time production breakdown per energy source. We build on recent studies reporting an increased awareness generated by eco feedback systems that also integrate micro-production information, taking advantage of a closed grid production network on an island with a high concentration of renewables, we deployed the What-a-Watt system in a building with 9 households for a period of 34 consecutive weeks. Results show that all the participating families have shown increased awareness of the production and distribution of electricity, thus becoming more familiarized with concepts such as the different sources of energy and how their availability relates to external variables such as weather conditions and time of day. Furthermore, our results also show, that the families using our system have managed to reduce their overall consumption. This research is a first attempt to provide more effective eco-feedback systems to consumers by integrating complex Smartgrid information in the feedback.