Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 7, numbers 3 and 4, 2014 // View article

USEM: A Ubiquitous Smart Energy Management System for Residential Homes

Authors:
Masood Masoodian
Elisabeth André
Michael Kugler
Florian Reinhart
Bill Rogers
Kevin Schlieper

Keywords: Building energy management, energy usage monitoring; energy usage visualization; information visualization; mobile user interfaces; user evaluation; persuasive technology

Abstract:
With the ever-increasing worldwide demand for energy, and the limited available energy resources, there is a growing need to reduce our energy consumption whenever possible. Therefore, over the past few decades a range of technologies have been proposed to assist consumers with reducing their energy use. Most of these have focused on decreasing energy consumption in the industry, transport, and services sectors. In more recent years, however, growing attention has been given to energy use in the residential sector, which accounts for nearly 30% of total energy consumption in the developed countries. Here we present one such system, which aims to assist residential users with monitoring their energy usage and provides mechanisms for setting up and controlling their home appliances to conserve energy. We also describe a user study we have conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this system in supporting its users with a range of tools and visualizations developed for ubiquitous devices such as mobile phones and tablets. The findings of this study have shown the potential benefits of our system, and have identified areas of improvement that need to be addressed in the future.

Pages: 519 to 532

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2014. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2014

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679