Abstract
Conserving energy amenable to the activities of occupants in public buildings is a particularly challenging objective that includes associating energy consumption to particular individuals and providing them with incentives to alter their behavior. This paper describes a gamification framework that aims to facilitate achieving greater energy conservation in public buildings. The framework leverages IoT-enabled low-cost devices, to improve energy disaggregation mechanisms that provide energy use and—consequently—wastage information at the device, area and end-user level. The identified wastages are concurrently targeted by a gamified application that motivates respective behavioral changes combining team competition, virtual rewards and life simulation. Our solution is being developed iteratively with the end-users’ engagement during the analysis, design, development and validation phases in public buildings located in three different countries: Luxembourg (Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art), Spain (EcoUrbanBuilding, Institut Català d’Energia headquarters, Barcelona) and Greece (General Secretariat of the Municipality of Athens).
Highlights
According to 2017 data, energy consumption in public buildings was 40% greater than that in residential buildings, while only 30% of non-residential buildings are public [1]
We employ a serious game approach, accessible through a mobile app, to engage and motivate users to save energy. This serious game involves team competition with intangible rewards and life simulation with the evolution of a virtual tree according to the performance of team members in energy-saving or energy-awareness challenges
In [12], a gamification approach with similar goals to ours is described, yet with a different game scenario and technological approach. They promote a list of actions that reduce energy wastage, and reward or penalize building occupants with redeemable virtual coins for following these actions
Summary
According to 2017 data, energy consumption in public buildings was 40% greater than that in residential buildings, while only 30% of non-residential buildings are public [1]. In [12], a gamification approach with similar goals to ours is described, yet with a different game scenario and technological approach They promote a list of actions that reduce energy wastage, and reward or penalize building occupants with redeemable virtual coins for following these actions. During our ethnographic studies and online surveys with the occupants of the pilot sites of ChArGED, we found that observing actions of others would violate their privacy concerns and that penalizing users for their non-energy efficient behavior would completely demotivate them to engage into the game in the first place. As the engagement of occupants in public buildings to such a game app cannot be taken for granted, we followed a carefully-designed gamified approach Our approach employs both direct incentives and peer pressure to achieve the desired behavior change towards energy-consumption reduction, in terms of team competition with rewards.
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