Scenarios for Educational and Game Activities using Internet of Things Data

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behavior and habits concerning energy usage and the environment is key to achieving a sustainable planet. The goal to address the global climate problem requires informing the population on their roles in mitigation actions and adaptation of sustainable behaviors. Addressing climate change and achieve ambitious energy and climate targets requires a change in citizen behavior and consumption practices. IoT sensing and related scenario and practices, which address school children via discovery, gamification, and educational activities, are examined in this paper. Use of seawater sensors in STEM education, that has not previously been addressed, is included in these educational scenaria

Cities and climate change: Strategic options for philanthropic support

Now, more than ever, cities are at the front lines of U.S. climate action. As national action stalls, there is still a daunting amount to be done in reducing human-generated climate emissions. Fortunately, this report comes in the wake of a groundswell of initiatives to engage on climate change by cities, countries, and states across the U.S. Several important and thorough reports on the types of mitigation actions cities can take have recently been released. We already have examples of cities taking significant leadership roles in reducing their own climate emissions, from New York and Boston to Austin, Boulder, and Los Angeles - yet U.S. climate emissions continue to rise, and cities have an outsized role to play. The purpose of this project is to review current U.S. city climate activities in order to identify areas where additional investment by foundations could help accelerate city action to reduce urban greenhouse gas emissions. The focus of the inquiry is on aggressive actions cities can take that significantly increase their “level of ambition” to achieve emissions reductions on an accelerated timetable. City strategies on climate adaptation are not encompassed in this project. [TRUNCATED

Smart Grid for the Smart City

Modern cities are embracing cutting-edge technologies to improve the services they offer to the citizens from traffic control to the reduction of greenhouse gases and energy provisioning. In this chapter, we look at the energy sector advocating how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and signal processing techniques can be integrated into next generation power grids for an increased effectiveness in terms of: electrical stability, distribution, improved communication security, energy production, and utilization. In particular, we deliberate about the use of these techniques within new demand response paradigms, where communities of prosumers (e.g., households, generating part of their electricity consumption) contribute to the satisfaction of the energy demand through load balancing and peak shaving. Our discussion also covers the use of big data analytics for demand response and serious games as a tool to promote energy-efficient behaviors from end users

Tailored gamification and serious game framework based on fuzzy logic for saving energy in connected thermostats

Connected thermostats (CTs) often save less energy than predicted because consumers may not know how to use them and may not be engaged in saving energy. Additionally, several models perform contrary to consumers’ expectations and are thus not used the way they are intended to. As a result, CTs save less energy and are underused in households. This paper reviews aspects of gamification and serious games focused on engaging consumers. A gamification and serious games framework is proposed for saving energy that is tailored by a fuzzy logic system to motivate connected thermostat consumers. This intelligent gamification framework can be used to customize the gamification and serious game strategy to each consumer so that fuzzy logic systems can be adapted according to the requirements of each consumer. The framework is designed to teach, engage, and motivate consumers while helping them save electrical energy when using their thermostats. It is described the proposed framework as well as a mockup that can be run on a cellphone. Although this framework is designed to be implemented in CTs, it can be translated to their energy devices in smart homes

Analysis of the gamification applications to improve the energy savings in residential buildings

This paper proposes a set of metrics to evaluate and compare applications in a new but quickly developing field – energy management software (EMS) in residential buildings. The goal of the paper is to highlight tendencies and to detect drawbacks of pre sent applications to develop a new one taking into account the results of previous analysis. It shows a shortlist of applications examined. Provides the conclusion drawing to the metrics and proposes mai n issues to be considered in the development of a new application.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Data fusion strategies for energy efficiency in buildings: Overview, challenges and novel orientations

Recently, tremendous interest has been devoted to develop data fusion strategies for energy efficiency in buildings, where various kinds of information can be processed. However, applying the appropriate data fusion strategy to design an efficient energy efficiency system is not straightforward; it requires a priori knowledge of existing fusion strategies, their applications and their properties. To this regard, seeking to provide the energy research community with a better understanding of data fusion strategies in building energy saving systems, their principles, advantages, and potential applications, this paper proposes an extensive survey of existing data fusion mechanisms deployed to reduce excessive consumption and promote sustainability. We investigate their conceptualizations, advantages, challenges and drawbacks, as well as performing a taxonomy of existing data fusion strategies and other contributing factors. Following, a comprehensive comparison of the state-of-the-art data fusion based energy efficiency frameworks is conducted using various parameters, including data fusion level, data fusion techniques, behavioral change influencer, behavioral change incentive, recorded data, platform architecture, IoT technology and application scenario. Moreover, a novel method for electrical appliance identification is proposed based on the fusion of 2D local texture descriptors, where 1D power signals are transformed into 2D space and treated as images. The empirical evaluation, conducted on three real datasets, shows promising performance, in which up to 99.68% accuracy and 99.52% F1 score have been attained. In addition, various open research challenges and future orientations to improve data fusion based energy efficiency ecosystems are explored

Review of Serious Energy Games : Objectives, Approaches, Applications, Data Integration, and Performance Assessment

In recent years, serious energy games (SEGs) garnered increasing attention as an innovative and effective approach to tackling energy-related challenges. This review delves into the multifaceted landscape of SEG, specifically focusing on their wide-ranging applications in various contexts. The study investigates potential enhancements in user engagement achieved through integrating social connections, personalization, and data integration. Among the main challenges identified, previous studies overlooked the full potential of serious games in addressing emerging needs in energy systems, opting for oversimplified approaches. Further, these studies exhibit limited scalability and constrained generalizability, which poses challenges in applying their findings to larger energy systems and diverse scenarios. By incorporating lessons learned from prior experiences, this review aims to propel the development of SEG toward more innovative and impactful directions. It is firmly believed that positive behavior changes among individuals can be effectively encouraged by using SEG

Responsible Environmental Behavior, Energy Conservation, and Compact Fluorescent Bulbs: You Can Lead a Horse to Water, But Can You Make It Drink?

Despite professing to care about the environment and supporting environmental causes, individuals behave in environmentally irresponsible ways like driving when they can take public transportation, littering, or disposing of toxic materials in unsound ways. This is the author\u27s fourth exploration of how to encourage individuals to stop behaving irresponsibly about the environment they allege to care deeply about. The prior three articles all explored how the norm of environmental protection could be enlisted in this effort; this article applies those theoretical conclusions to the very practical task of getting people to switch the type of light bulb they use. To accomplish this, the article synthesizes the previous articles into an assumption about the critical role of norms in changing personal behavior and tests that assumption by exploring how to make individuals more responsible consumers of electricity and adhere to the concrete norm of energy conservation by swapping out their incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescent lights (“CFLs”). The agreed upon goal behind energy conservation is to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuel-based energy production, thus reducing the emission of harmful airborne pollutants and greenhouse gases as well as the related environmental harms associated with coal production. One way to reduce residential energy consumption is to persuade individuals to switch to CFLs. Up to ninety percent of energy produced by incandescent bulbs is lost as heat; switching to CFLs is one way to prevent this energy loss