A Human-Centred Approach for Residential Energy Efficiency Improving

Abstract

Smart-cities rely on enhancing the relationships between the actors that composes them so that their offered services grow in number, quality and efficiency. One of these actual services is the energy providing, which demand for efficiency puts it at the top of the list for an urgent smartening. It is estimated that the energy consumption in buildings accounts for 40% of the total energy needs in Europe. It also emerges as good fit for an internet-based solution due to its decentralized and heterogeneous profile. This fact has been acknowledged by the grid stakeholders, which are investing in the development of internetbased solutions for monitoring and controlling home appliances. But these solutions seem to be missing the technology’s full potential to aggregate the grid with the consumers, as the former are not significantly responding to this call. This work proposes a human-centred approach for this technology, by keeping the human in the loop and empowering its own smartening by using behavioural data instead of consumption data, and by bringing an emotional attachment to the task of improving households’ consumption by gamifying the interface with this data. To achieve this goal a connected device and an online platform to support it were developed. A pilot stage to showcase the impact on refrigerators’ usage, and consequently their consumption, was prepared, and preliminary results were gathered.