Home Energy Consumption Feedback: A User Survey

Buildings account for a relevant fraction of the energy consumed by a country, up to 20-40% of the yearly energy consumption. If only electricity is considered, the fraction is even bigger, reaching around 73% of the total electricity consumption, equally divided into residential and commercial dwellings. Building and Home Automation have a potential to profoundly impact current and future buildings' energy efficiency by informing users about their current consumption patterns, by suggesting more efficient behaviors, and by pro-actively changing/modifying user actions for reducing the associated energy wastes. In this paper we investigate the capability of an automated home to automatically, and timely, inform users about energy consumption, by harvesting opinions of residential inhabitants on energy feedback interfaces. We report here the results of an on-line survey, involving nearly a thousand participants, about feedback mechanisms suggested by the research community, with the goal of understanding what feedback is felt by home inhabitants easier to understand, more likely to be used, and more effective in promoting behavior changes. Contextually, we also collect and distill users' attitude towards in-home energy displays and their preferred locations, gathering useful insights on user-driven design of more effective in-home energy display

Design and Implementation of a Multi-Standard Event-Driven Energy Management System For Smart Buildings

This paper presents the design and implementation of a multi-standard energy management system, which leverages heterogeneous devices to convert existing buildings into Smart Buildings. Its main purpose is to increase the energy efficiency of buildings providing user awareness to promote green behaviors. The proposed solution has been designed to enable interoperability across different standards and protocols in order to develop applications with which end users can interact with the system. Finally, a web portal and a smartphone application to give feedback and to view environmental information are presented

How smart is the Italian domestic environment? A quantitative study

The market for smart home products in Italy appears to be growing quicker than in other European countries. Continuous technological advances have lowered the price for entry products, allowing more families to acquire smart solutions. Meanwhile, after the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of the domestic environment as a hybrid space where to conduct different activities that require smart and connected appliances has significantly grown. Ultimately, economic and social instability has produced a higher awareness of energy consumption, bringing many users to question their lifestyle choices and look for smarter and greener solutions. The evolution of living conditions through the growth of smart technology in houses and apartments must be explored by interaction designers, to provide effective user experiences of smart artifacts, that need to seamlessly connect with one another and function together, within a complex, multimodal environment. Considering this, the paper presents the results of a quantitative study carried out at the end of 2021, through an online survey that was completed by 135 respondents. Data are analysed by grouping the respondents in 3 categories: single tenants, couples or roommates (unrelated to each other), and families (at least one parent with their offspring). Different visualizations highlight which rooms are "smarter"-although Italian households appear to be less technological than expected. The main findings concern the relationship between wider technological ecosystems and larger groups of tenants living together, and how the ownership of a smart product leads to the acquisition of other products-thus building a complex network of non-human players

The Smartphone as the Incumbent “Thing” among the Internet of Things

The smartphone has been the ubiquitous computing platform in the past decade. However, emerging consumer Internet of Things (IoT) technology trends, such as smartwatches and smart speakers, promise the establishment of new ubiquitous platforms. We model two competing horizontally-differentiated platforms that each offer a smartphone and another smart device. This market diverges markedly from standard mixed bundling results when devices from the same vendor have super-additive utility. We show that the degree of a smart device’s differentiation (relative to the smartphone) is the prime factor determining if it is profitable to deepen integration between a smart device with the incumbent smartphone platform. We provide managerial insights for technology strategy