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SUMMARY
Long-term energy consumption reduction can be achieved more readily through sensible cooperation between end users and technological advancements. Monitoring energy use within buildings requires clear and reliable methods with outputs that are meaningful and helpful. End users play a pivotal role in shaping any such outputs as energy use revolves around their presence and comfort.
Consumers appreciate that innovative technology can increase their quality of life. However, a lasting bond between the two can only occur when users have confidence in the technology around them. This is more likely to happen when users and technologists work collectively in the system design process.
The DANCER project takes insights from users’ behaviour analysis, metering schemes, wireless sensors and embedded software to produce a system that both interactively and automatically manages users’ energy consumption within indoor environments. It will tailor users’ energy consumption to their habits aiming to reduce energy consumption. To achieve this DANCER adopts a multidisciplinary approach where knowledge from psychology, social and economic research, wireless communication and computer science unite to provide a viable solution that is beneficial to all the stakeholders on the energy supply-consumer chain.
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SOLUTIONS
- Using wireless sensor networks to collect, collate and study end users’ energy consumption habits so as to inform the design of energy control systems and the user interfaces
- Employing an iterative, participatory design approach to explore how end users feel about the project’s digital technologies and how they imagine these technologies can assist them in reducing their energy consumption and carbon footprint
- Testing increasingly mature versions of the DANCER system through a series of pilot studies with volunteers so that users’ queries about the sensors, networks and control policies being used to monitor and interactively manage their energy use can be further examined
- Verifiying and validating the mature DANCER system in a control trial experiment where samples of households will be either provided with DANCER or allocated to appropriate control conditions
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LINK: http://dclgw.essex.ac.uk/index.php/projects/current/dancer
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