Design Home Energy Feedback: Understanding Home Contexts and Filling the Gaps

Abstract

Efficient home energy consumption is a complex, dynamic activity, and householders need to monitor, plan and act with the support of home energy feedback system. This paper reviews the existing literatures of home energy feedback system design, and summarizes the characteristics of home contexts from the householder’s perspective, including low level of attention, motivation, effort, as well as short of knowledge and skills. We then analyze the gaps of using energy feedback system to support the users’ energy actives from perspective of data, information and user engagement, and we propose that using ambient display and natural interaction could improve the effectiveness of home energy feedback systems.