15,799 research outputs found

    What Would You Ask to Your Home if It Were Intelligent? Exploring User Expectations about Next-Generation Homes

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    Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research is giving birth to a multitude of futuristic home scenarios and applications; however a clear discrepancy between current installations and research-level designs can be easily noticed. Whether this gap is due to the natural distance between research and engineered applications or to mismatching of needs and solutions remains to be understood. This paper discusses the results of a survey about user expectations with respect to intelligent homes. Starting from a very simple and open question about what users would ask to their intelligent homes, we derived user perceptions about what intelligent homes can do, and we analyzed to what extent current research solutions, as well as commercially available systems, address these emerging needs. Interestingly, most user concerns about smart homes involve comfort and household tasks and most of them can be currently addressed by existing commercial systems, or by suitable combinations of them. A clear trend emerges from the poll findings: the technical gap between user expectations and current solutions is actually narrower and easier to bridge than it may appear, but users perceive this gap as wide and limiting, thus requiring the AmI community to establish a more effective communication with final users, with an increased attention to real-world deploymen

    Smarter grid through collective intelligence: user awareness for enhanced performance

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    This paper examines the scenario of a university campus, and the impact on energy consumption of the awareness of building managers and users (lecturers, students and administrative staff).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

    Review of UK microgeneration. Part 1 : policy and behavioural aspects

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    A critical review of the literature relating to government policy and behavioural aspects relevant to the uptake and application of microgeneration in the UK is presented. Given the current policy context aspiring to zero-carbon new homes by 2016 and a variety of minimum standards and financial policy instruments supporting microgeneration in existing dwellings, it appears that this class of technologies could make a significant contribution to UK energy supply and low-carbon buildings in the future. Indeed, achievement of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 80% (the UK government's 2050 target) for the residential sector may entail substantial deployment of microgeneration. Realisation of the large potential market for microgeneration relies on a variety of inter-related factors such as microeconomics, behavioural aspects, the structure of supporting policy instruments and well-informed technology development. This article explores these issues in terms of current and proposed policy instruments in the UK. Behavioural aspects associated with both initial uptake of the technology and after purchase are also considered

    Identifying the opportunities for ICT based energy demand reduction in family homes

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    It is widely recognised that the residential sector will play an important role in achieving UK national targets for reductions in energy consumption and CO2 production. This will be achieved through efficiency gains in devices, improvements to the building fabric and systems, more effective utilisation of devices and through accepting lower levels of comfort and convenience. Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) and other Information and Communication (ICT) based solutions are attractive because they offer help in managing device/systems and can be applied to reducing consumption while (potentially) mitigating the impact on comfort and lifestyle. This paper attempts to quantify the energy reduction potential for HEMS/ICT through a systematic treatment of monitoring data from real family homes. The analysis describes for the first time the notion of the ‘Reduction Effort Balance’ that exists between capital expenditure and acceptance of less comfort and convenience and it is demonstrated that HEMS/ICT could influence up to 50% of the possible energy demand reduction. The findings also suggest that it is highly unlikely that energy reduction targets will be met without changes to occupant lifestyle

    Personalized Ambience: An Integration of Learning Model and Intelligent Lighting Control

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    The number of households and offices adopting automation system is on the rise. Although devices and actuators can be controlled through wireless transmission, they are mostly static with preset schedules, or at different times it requires human intervention. This paper presents a smart ambience system that analyzes the user’s lighting habits, taking into account different environmental context variables and user needs in order to automatically learn about the user’s preferences and automate the room ambience dynamically. Context information is obtained from Yahoo Weather and environmental data pertaining to the room is collected via Cubesensors to study the user’s lighting habits. We employs a learning model known as the Reduced Error Prune Tree (REPTree) to analyze the users’ preferences, and subsequently predicts the preferred lighting condition to be actuated in real time through Philips Hue. The system is able to ensure the user’s comfort at all time by performing a closed feedback control loop which checks and maintains a suitable lighting ambience at optimal level
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