Smart Home Energy Visualizer: A Fusion of Data Analytics and Information Visualization

Abstract

While technology advancements are continuously improving, the energy efficiency of household appliances, energy consumption analysis, and providing feedback to consumers on this analysis remains a critical issue in ensuring the effectiveness of such improvements. Visual feedback is a promising technique for promoting energy conservation by applying demand response (DR) in smart home energy management systems (SHEMSs). In this article, we propose a smart home energy visualization (SHEV) system, an SHEMS that comprises three components: Appliance Profile Detector with XCorrelation (APDX) that monitors the activation of household appliances, operation modes identification using cycles clustering (OMICC) to identify the operation modes used, and the visualizer to represent the appliance usage-related information to the user using concentric circles representation (CCR). This visualization assists the consumer in applying DR by better understanding the appliance usage so that the consumer makes sense of the consumption, and hence, better decision-making in energy conservation.