Delivering group-based feedback of electricity usage in campus dorms

Abstract

The installation of smart meters in buildings introduces new opportunities for system and application design, to encourage energy conservation or other environmentally friendly behaviors. Delivering feedback to users is a widely-adopted approach that can potentially influence behaviors effectively. The main contribution of our work includes designing and implementing systems to deliver feedback of electricity usage in a real campus dormitory environment, as well as applying a data analytic approach to generate group-based comparative feedback. The approach divides users into groups based on actual usage data, rather than doing it statically, based on long-term patterns. We believe that the group-based feedback can encourage energy conservation more effectively.