A Participatory Design Approach for Energy-aware Mobile App for

Smart Home Monitoring

Alessandro Aliberti

, Christian Camarda

, Valeria Ferro

, Andrea Acquaviva

and Edoardo Patti

Dept. of Control and Computer Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy

Midori s.r.l., Torino, Italy

Keywords:

Participatory Design, User-awareness, User-centered, Energy Aware, Smart Home, Smart Metering, Prosumer.

Abstract:

It is generally recognized that our behaviours affect the environment. However, it is difﬁcult to correlate

behaviour of an individual person to large-scale problems. This is usually due to insufﬁcient ergonomy of

available tools. The main cause is that most of user-awareness tools available are technology-centered instead

of user-centered. In this paper, we present a participatory design approach we followed to design and develop

an energy-aware mobile application for user-awareness on energy consumption for Smart Home monitoring.

To engage end-users from the early design stages, we conduct two on-line surveys and a focus group involving

about 630 people. Results allowed on identifying functional requirements and guidelines for mobile app

design. The purpose of this research is to increase user-awareness on energy consumption using tools and

methods required by users themselves. Furthermore in this paper, we present the technological choices that

drove our implementation of an energy-aware application based on prosumers’ requirements.

1 INTRODUCTION

Traditionally, technicians and engineers design sys-

tems with a technology-centered perspective. In re-

cent years, there is a deep change in the design

approach: from technology-centered philosophy to

user-centered. In this way, new design challenges are

projected on a new way to mold a system interface

considering capabilities and needs of end-users. This

philosophy aims at achieving optimal functioning of

overall human-machine system (Endsley, 2011). The

main principles of this design pattern can be sum-

marized as follows: i) design technology around the

user needs, tasks and abilities; ii) design technology

to help users in easily achieve a goal and make a deci-

sion; iii) design technology to make aware the users.

In a dynamic and complex system, decision mak-

ing depends on situation awareness; thus, knowing

what is happening. In (Faruqui et al., 2010), the

authors prove how user-awareness inﬂuences the en-

ergy savings at home and helps user to change their

own habits towards green attitudes. Consequently,

developers have to understand user-awareness as per-

sonalization of services delivered to consumers and

prosumers

(Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). This

Active consumer. New ﬁgure of producing consumer.

is achieved by choosing proper data processing

and transmission methods, according to functional

and non-functional requirements stated by end-user.

These requirements can be formulated explicitly or be

a result of automatic recommendations that are based

on application usage (Gra

na and Toro, 2012).

To actively involve consumers and prosumers on

early planning and design stages of an energy-aware

app for Smart Home monitoring, we carried out two

on-line surveys and a focus group involving about 630

people in total. The subsequent results have been ex-

ploited to deﬁne guidelines on which the entire appli-

cation is based, also it highlighted many issues and

lacks. These results highlighted a general lack of

awareness on energy consumption. Very often, users

do not know consumptions and operating status of

their appliances, while they perceive it as an essen-

tial information to know. Thus, users believe that a

(near-) real-time energy-aware system is needed, even

to promote green behaviours.

In this work, we aim at better understanding the

importance of user-centered methodology to design

and develop an energy-aware mobile application for

Smart Home monitoring. We present the followed

Participatory Design methodology to deﬁne func-

tional requirements and guidelines to develop such

a tool. The rest of this paper is organized as fol-

158

Aliberti, A., Camarda, C., Ferro, V., Acquaviva, A. and Patti, E.

A Participatory Design Approach for Energy-aware Mobile App for Smart Home Monitoring.

DOI: 10.5220/0006299001580165

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Smar t Cities and Green ICT Systems (SMARTGREENS 2017), pages 158-165

ISBN: 978-989-758-241-7

lows. Section 2 reviews literature solutions on user-

awareness for energy consumption in smart environ-

ments. Section 3 describes the followed participatory

design methodology. It also presents the results of

two on-line surveys and a focus group we conducted

to understand the functional requirements requested

by users. These requirements have been taken into

account to develop an energy-aware mobile app for

Smart Home monitoring that is presented in Section 4.

Finally, Section 5 discusses concluding remarks and

future works.

2 RELATED WORK

There are a lot of research works in the ﬁeld

of user-awareness for energy saving. EnergyLife

project (Jacucci et al., 2009) represents one of the ﬁrst

experiments where during the design phase the au-

thors studied end-users’ behaviors to realize a mobile

platform close to users’ needs. Two relevant projects

developed with LinkSmart

are Energy Aware Smart

Home (Jahn et al., 2010) and EnergyPULSE (Jahn

et al., 2011). LinkSmart is middleware designed to

create distributed applications and platforms to inter-

act with Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Both En-

ergy Aware Smart Home and EnergyPULSE projects

develop smart energy efﬁcient applications in hetero-

geneous environments. Energy Aware Smart Home

includes smart metering and control of home appli-

ances combined with novel user interaction applica-

tions. EnergyPULSE allows the monitoring of power

consumption of appliances and other environmental

values in the ofﬁce domain (e.g. temperature, pres-

ence). It aims at providing a basis for new kinds of

user-centered feedback systems in such an environ-

ment.

In Energy Aware Smart Home (Jahn et al., 2010),

the authors deploy stationary and mobile interfaces

that allow end-user to monitor and control smart

homes. For each appliance the system User-Interface

(UI) displays current consumption in watts, costs per

hour, and costs projected over one year. As smart plat-

form, they implement UbiLense (Reiners and Jentsch,

2009), an Augmented Reality (AR) (Carmigniani

et al., 2011) system that aims at improving the user-

experience. This application recognizes objects using

image-processing methods and displays energy con-

sumption information about the target device. This

AR-awareness system improves the user-experience

but in any case end-users must interact with pre-

designed UI. This type of design is still technology-

https://linksmart.eu/redmine

centered.

In EnergyPULSE (Jahn et al., 2011), the authors

use Business Ethnography

(BE) (Stevens and Nett,

2009) approach to study if users understand the infor-

mation collected by the system and if they perceive

these information as useful for reducing the energy

waste. Through three workshops, involving 12 peo-

ple, the authors have deﬁned and analyzed users re-

quirements to improve their system. Speciﬁcally, they

have understood some energy practices in work places

and how they may affect on energy consumptions.

Differently from our participatory design approach,

Jahn et al. impose a default UI and data set. Only

through a subsequent study, involving end-users, they

evaluate possible design guidelines to consider in de-

velopment of such systems. These improvements are

not implemented but they represent the starting point

for future developments.

3 IDENTIFICATION OF TARGET

USERS AND FUNCTIONAL

REQUIREMENTS

In (Faruqui et al., 2010), the authors emphasize

how user-awareness on energy consumption can pos-

itively affect the energy savings at home. In partic-

ular, if end-users know their energy consumption in

(near-) real-time, they can save around 7-17% of en-

ergy. Hence, a proper user-awareness and notiﬁca-

tion system is needed to promote green behaviours

and convince users in changing their habits, which

is not trivial. The rest of this section presents the

results of two on-line surveys and a focus group we

conducted. We exploited this results to identify func-

tional requirements, strengths and improvements re-

quested by users to design and develop an efﬁcient

energy-awareness application, presented in Section 4.

Particular emphasis was given on gathering users’ in-

formation, ideas, opinions and attitudes on energy

consumption and efﬁciency.

3.1 Target User Survey

The ﬁrst on-line survey was focused on identifying

target user. It consists of ten questions regarding

i) Personal Information and ii) Energy Consumption

Interests, as reported in Table 1. It involved 528 per-

sons and results are shown in Figure 1 and discussed

in the following.

The Business Ethnography is a supporting method to

evolutionary design conceptions and relative forms of prod-

uct ﬁnding.

A Participatory Design Approach for Energy-aware Mobile App for Smart Home Monitoring

159

(a) Distribution of age of surveyed people. (b) Distribution of level of education of surveyed people.

13%

27%

28%

30%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

Under. 20k 20k.- 30k 30k.- 45k Over.45k Missing

Income'in' Euro

Yearly.income

€"343"

€"452"

€"617"

€"680"

€"795"

0"€

100"€

200"€

300"€

400"€

500"€

600"€

700"€

800"€

900"€

1 2 3 4 over"5

Consumption* costs* (in*Euro)

Inhabitants

Average"ann ual"consumption " per"inhabitant

(d) Average consumption (in Euro) per inhabitant.

!"#

$"#

%"#

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4567,2,- -8/28699: 1 62;,-8,2,73<8;/2 -=>9 ?1/2

(e) Current awareness on appliances energy consumption.

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(f) Perceived relevance on energy awareness for appli-

ances.

29%

63%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

1+(not+ inter est ed )+ 2 3

4+(very+

interested)+

Declar ed( l evel( of( inter est

Reduce+energy+consumption+ to+save+money

(g) Declared level of interest on reducing energy consump-

tion to save money.

30%

66%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

1*(not* interested)* 2 3 4*(very*in terested)*

Declar ed( lev el( of( i nterest

Reduce*energy*consumption* to*preserve*the*

environment

(h) Declared level of interest on reducing energy consump-

tion to preserve the environment.

Figure 1: Results of ﬁrst survey.

SMARTGREENS 2017 - 6th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems

160

Figure 1(a) shows the age distribution of the sur-

veyed people. 47% are under 40 years old. Respec-

tively, 1% are under 24, 18% between 24 and 29 and

28% between 30 and 39 years old. On the other hand,

40% are over 40. The remaining 13% did not an-

swer the question. Figure 1(b) highlights that 84%

of users have a high level of education (respectively,

49% have a bachelor’s or master’s degree and 35% a

doctorate degree). Then, 14% are high school gradu-

ated (diploma or equivalent) and almost 1% are mid-

dle school graduated.

Figure 1(c) reports the yearly income in Euro,

grouped into four ranges. As it can be gathered

from the ﬁgure, the distribution on the highest income

ranges (respectively, 20k-30k, 30k-45k and over 45k)

is almost uniform, between 27% and 30%. Only 13%

of the users declared an income under 20k.

Figure 1(d) reports the average annual consump-

tion expense in Euro. This Figure reveals that the ex-

pense rises proportionally with the number of inhab-

itants. Indeed, the impact of each additional inhabi-

tant on the yearly consumption is about e100. This

observation stems from correlating the outcomes of

question 3 (How many people live with you (includ-

ing you)?) and question 5 (How much did you spend

on electricity bills in the past 12 months?).

Figure 1(e) highlights that 70% of users are not

aware of their energy consumption and they do not

know how much they spend for each appliance.

Hence, knowing the consumption of each appliance

is relevant for 75% of the total users, as revealed in

Figure 1(f).

Table 1: Questions proposed during the ﬁrst survey.

Question Answers

Personal Information

1. What is your age?

under 24 years old

24-29 years old

30-39 years old

over 40 years old

2. What is the highest degree or level

of education you have completed?

middle school graduate

high school graduate, diploma or equivalent

bachelor’s or Master’s degree

doctorate degree

3. How many people live with

you (including you)?

over 5

4. What is your yearly income?

under 20k

20k - 30k

30k - 45k

over 45k

Energy Consumptions

5. How much did you spend on electricity

bills in the past 12 months?

under 300

300 - 499

500 - 699

700 - 999

over 1000

6. Do you know exactly how much you

consume and how much you spend

for your appliances?

yes, I do

no, I do not know

7. How relevant is it for you to be aware on

energy consumption and costs of

your appliances?

choose between 1 (irrelevant)

and 7 (very relevant)

8. Are you interested in reducing your

consumption because you would reduce

your monthly bill?

choose between 1 (not interested)

and 4 (very interested)

9. Are you interested in reducing your

consumption because you would help

reducing pollutant emissions?

10. Do you have any additional comment? open answer

Finally, Figure 1(g) reports that 92% of users are

interested in reducing energy consumption because

they want to cut their monthly bills. This percent-

age raises to 96% if the reason to reduce energy con-

sumption changes in decreasing pollutant emissions,

as shown in Figure 1(h).

Correlating the answers on demographic variables

(i.e. age, level of education, yearly income and yearly

average consumption in Euro), the resulting analysis

highlights that people are interested on having general

information on energy consumption. In detail, 96%

of the surveyed people with an age between 24 and 29

years old declared an high interest. Increasing the age,

interest decreases. Indeed, in 93% of users with an

age between 30 and 39 years old declared a medium-

high interest for energy-related information. From the

level of education viewpoint, energy awareness is per-

ceived relevant for 94% and 95% of surveyed people

with high school diploma and Bachelor’s or Master’s

degree respectively. Considering the average annual

consumption, the general interest is around 95% for

users with yearly expense among e500 and e699 on

electricity bills. This decreases to 88% for users in

the range of e700 and e999. Focusing on having de-

tailed information on the energy awareness for each

single appliance, there is greater interest: i) among

users between 24 and 29 years, about 82%; ii) among

graduated, about 79%; and iii) among people with a

yearly expense between e500 and e699, about 79%.

On the other hand, disaggregated information raises

less interest among people i) over 40 years old, about

69%; and ii) with a yearly income over 45ke, about

68%.

Finally among the last question replies (Do you

have any additional comment?), many people sug-

gested to include information about energy produc-

tion of their renewable plants (e.g. Photovoltaic sys-

tems). They also would like to be recommended

on optimizing self-consumption, thus maximizing the

use of their renewable systems.

3.2 Requirements Focus Group

The second step of our research was a face-to-face fo-

cus group that involved six graduated people between

30 and 35 years old. It has been organized as an open

discussion among the participants with a moderator.

The purpose of this focus group was to deepen qual-

itative information that were difﬁcult to identify with

on-line surveys. Thus, the moderator addressed the

discussion on topics about i) consumer habits, ii) per-

ception and awareness on energy consumption, iii) in-

terest in energy efﬁciency and iv) relations with the

energy provider.

A Participatory Design Approach for Energy-aware Mobile App for Smart Home Monitoring

161

The focus group highlighted that participants are

not aware of monthly and yearly energy consump-

tions. However, they know approximately the aver-

age bill expenses. Indeed, they refer to their bills to

roughly verify if energy consumptions are coherent

with the amount to pay. Furthermore, the participants

stressed that bills are difﬁcult to read. Sometimes,

consumers distrust their energy providers. For exam-

ple the electricity market is perceived as something

very complex. The energy provider is seen as a dis-

tant entity that should limit its role to strictly provide

electricity.

Regarding energy-awareness, participants think

that such solutions should not be invasive and end-

users should choose the notiﬁcations to receive and

their frequency. A good compromise, raised during

the discussion, is receiving a weekly update of main

notiﬁcations, again chosen by users. Moreover, par-

ticipants consider useful that such notiﬁcations guide

them into a gradual change of their habits towards vir-

tuous behaviours. To facilitate this changes, they also

underline that notiﬁcations should encourage users

with positive reinforcement rather than negative with-

out stressing incorrect habits.

Finally, from this focus group raised that partici-

pants are not concerned by privacy issues. They de-

clare to be almost resigned in providing their sensitive

information. However, they would not like to receive

advertising messages, for example, by their energy

supplier.

Table 2: Questions proposed during the second survey.

Give a rating between 1 (not interested) and 10 (very interested) to the following services

Knowing in real-time and in every moment what

my appliances consume and how much I pay

for them

Having a novel and innovative tool

Knowing the energy consumption (and spending

money) of my appliances on a daily basis

Protect the environment by reducing energy

consumption

Knowing the energy consumption (and spending

money) of my appliances on a weekly basis

Evaluating if my supply contract is the best

for me

Having during the month a forecast of the cost

of the next bill

Receiving offers and promotions from my

energy supplier

Receiving reports on malfunctioning or inefﬁcient

appliances

Having the chance to join purchasing groups

with people who have my same needs

Receiving personalized tips to ﬁgure out how

to better consume and spend

Checking if my bill match my consumption

Understand if my consumption are in line with

those of other similar families

Select notiﬁcations you are interested in (max 3)

An appliance is faulty or operates incorrectly

My spending threshold has been exceeded

for the current month

I am going to reach the maximum power threshold

A particularly inefﬁcient appliance has

been identiﬁed

There is a new custom hint to save money (e.g.

Switches from 4 to 3 weekly washes with your

washing machine to save 80 in one year)

Washer/dishwasher ﬁnished washing

or the food is ready (microwave/oven)

There is a device unusually turned on by too

many hours

There are interesting news from the

world of energy

I am not at home and an unusual electrical

activity was detected (e.g. lights on)

There are commercial offers for me

about tariffs, energy efﬁcient appliances,

tools and technologies

Select notiﬁcation frequency you prefer (max 1)

Daily Weekly

Never I choose

3.3 Requirements Survey

The last step of our research was a second on-line

survey to identify the main features requested by end-

users. Table 2 reports this second survey that involved

100 persons. Questions are grouped in three macro-

areas. Regarding the ﬁrst macro-area, the participant

had to give a rating between 1 (not interested) and

10 (very interested) among the thirteen possible ser-

vices such user-awareness system could provide. Fig-

ure 2(a) reports the results of this question. It de-

picts that all proposed services are perceived as im-

portant by users. Indeed, the average rank is over 6

with a maximum of 8.91 for Malfunctioning appli-

ances and Evaluating your contract. As regards the

second macro-area, participants were invited to select

a maximum of three out of ten notiﬁcations they per-

ceive as useful. The achieved results are shown in Fig-

ure 2(b). They range from 1% to 22%. In our analysis,

we chose to neglect notiﬁcations below 10% of inter-

est rate. The perceived most important are: i) Faulty

appliance (22%), ii) Inefﬁcient appliance (16%) and

iii) Unusual activity (16%). Finally, the third macro-

area required to select the preferred notiﬁcation fre-

quency among: i) Daily, ii) Weekly, iii) Never and iv) I

choose. As shown in Figure 3, participants prefer to

choose by themselves the notiﬁcation frequency.

From the presented results of the focus group

and both on-line surveys, we identiﬁed the functional

requirements exploited to design and develop the

Android application for energy-awareness in Smart

Home presented in Section 4.

4 ENERGY-AWARENESS APP

FOR SMART HOME

MONITORING

The identiﬁcation of end-users’ needs and require-

ments are done through a participatory design ap-

proach allows deﬁning guidelines to implement

an ergonomic energy-aware application for Smart

Home Monitoring that leverages upon our distributed

Software Infrastructure for Smart Metering called

FLEXMETER (Pau et al., 2016). FLEXMETER is

distributed platform that i) integrates heterogeneous

information of multiple energy vectors (e.g. electric-

ity, water, gas and heating); ii) correlate and post-

process data of different utilities; iii) provide ad-

vanced services to different stakeholders. In this view,

smart meters send data to FLEXMETER through the

Internet, thus becoming IoT devices (Schultz et al.,

2015), (Bahmanyar et al., 2016). To achieve our pur-

pose, we deployed our prototype Smart Meters at cus-

tomer premises. They are based on a Raspberry Pi

enhanced with an additional board to measure every

second both active and reactive power and send these

SMARTGREENS 2017 - 6th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems

162

(a) Decalred perceived importance for proposed services. (b) Declared preferences on useful notiﬁcations.

Figure 2: Results of second survey.

41%

28%

22%

Notification/frequency

I/choose

Daily

Weekly

Never

Figure 3: Declared preferences on notiﬁcation frequency.

collected data every 15 minutes.

Figure 1(a) shows that 47% of users surveyed are

under 40 years. Thus, we developed an application for

mobile smartphones and tablets equipped with An-

droid operating system. This app address the func-

tional requirements identiﬁed in Section 3 through a

participatory design approach.

The purpose of this application is to increases

user-awareness and promotes green behaviors allow-

ing end-users to have a complete overview of their

energy proﬁles. Knowing the itemized consumption

means having the necessary actionable feedback in-

formation to propose for reducing the energy waste

(Faruqui et al., 2010).

As shown in Figure 2(a), generally beneﬁts for

end-users are summarized in the following: i) having

a complete control of their energy proﬁle through sim-

ple and intuitive interface; ii) knowing the energy pro-

duction from renewable sources; iii) comparing the

energy production of renewable sources among dif-

ferent weeks, months or years; iv) knowing the disag-

gregated energy of the household appliances; v) dis-

covering which appliance is the most inefﬁcient one;

vi) comparing the disaggregated appliance consump-

tion among different weeks, months or years; vii) ob-

serving the energy consumption in (near-) real-time to

monitor the apartment and receive alarms whenever

the energy situation is not as expected.

Through a simple and intuitive interface, compli-

ant with the Android development standards, users

can access to all provided data by i) a Non-Intrusive

Load Monitoring (NILM) platform (Zoha et al.,

2012), which is a service provided by FLEXMETER

and ii) smart meters or appliances (e.g. smart plugs).

These data refer to electricity consumption and pro-

duction. To provide a complete overview of all en-

ergy consumptions in a Smart Home, we extend both

FLEXMETER and the Android app to other energy

vectors (i.e. gas, water and heating). These en-

ergy vectors are part of the considered case study.

FLEXMETER ﬂexibility allows the integration of any

other energy measure. Therefore, adding services re-

lated to new energy vectors is possible to characterize

a complete energy-proﬁle for each customer. Infor-

mation is retrieved by FLEXMETER through REST

web services (Fielding and Taylor, 2002) and all

the communication ﬂows are authenticated through a

token-based mechanism.

After the user authentication, the Main Activity

(Figure 4(a)) shows the logged user energy-proﬁle.

The user energy-proﬁle is represented as a collection

of energy vectors monitored through smart meters in

apartments. In detail, this activity presents instan-

taneous consumption and production for each mon-

itored energy vector. Such information is shown to

users using different indexes (unit of measurement,

costs and emitted CO

footprints) to involve and sen-

sitize the end-user (Wiedmann and Minx, 2008) (see

Figure 1(g) and Figure 1(h)).

Selecting an energy vector on the Main Activity,

the user accesses to the relative Consumption Activ-

ity. As shown in Figure 4(b), this activity presents

widgets to provide a detailed overview on energy con-

sumption and pollution using different indexes. The

same activity is used in case of renewable energy pro-

An Activity in Android is a software window that is

usually displayed in full-screen mode.

A Participatory Design Approach for Energy-aware Mobile App for Smart Home Monitoring

163

(a) Main Activity. (b) Consumption Activity. (c) Detailed Consumption Activity.

Figure 4: Example of activity views visualized with the Android mobile application.

Figure 5: Tips and Warnings Activity.

duction (e.g. photovoltaic systems) and data are up-

dated accordingly. Furthermore, FLEXMETER pro-

vides historical data for each energy vector. To better

know the energy performance, these data with differ-

ent granularity: daily, weekly, monthly or yearly.

The Detailed Consumption Activity (see Fig-

ure 4(c)) provides disaggregated data for each home

appliances retrieved from the NILM module and/or

smart appliances via FLEXMETER. Through an ap-

propriate conversions, this feature allows knowing en-

ergy consumption in costs and pollution indexes to

Figure 6: Video of the present Android App for User-

Awareness.

have a complete control of home appliances. Just at

the ﬁrst visual impact, user knows the whole energy

consumption for the appliances through a pie chart.

Then, a list details more speciﬁc information for each

appliance is given (e.g. i) daily, weekly, monthly and

annual average consumption, ii) hourly pollution and

iii) hourly consumption expense), also to provide in-

formation on their operating status at any time.

As shown in Figure 5 through a notiﬁcation

system, the user receives tips and warnings from

FLEXMETER. During both on-line surveys and fo-

cus group, participants have expressly requested a

tool to optimize self-consumption by maximizing the

use of their renewable energy systems (e.g. Photo-

voltaic panels). The proposed app is ready to notify

prosumers, recommending the best time-slots to turn

on appliances according to electricity self-production.

Finally, based on the requirements reported in Fig-

ure 2(a), Figure 2(b), and Figure 3, during the ﬁrst

application set-up, users can choose the receiving no-

tiﬁcations frequency. This functionality is empow-

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164

ered by Google Firebase push notiﬁcation system

that allows developers to organize a ﬂexible notiﬁ-

cation platform. In addition, the Tips and Warnings

Activity shows all tips received, highlighting unread

messages (see Figure 5).

Finally, to provide a demo of the proposed app, a

video is available on YouTube: just scan the QR code

in Figure 6 and click on the resulting link

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORKS

In this paper, we presented the participatory de-

sign methodology we followed to develop an energy-

aware app for Smart Home monitoring. We discussed

the results of two on-line surveys and a focus group to

identify the functional requirements for the proposed

app. These kind of interviews are needed to design

software to promote green behaviours, which is not a

trivial task. We also introduced the developed app that

leverages upon a Smart Metering Infrastructure. Such

infrastructure is needed to collect energy-related data

before providing post-processed information to end-

user apps. As future work, we spread this solution

to citizens to evaluate the acceptance level of user on

proposed suggestions, tips and alerts to promote vir-

tuous behaviours.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was partially supported by the EU project

FLEXMETER, by Siebel project ”POWER AWARE

- Lights off, brains on” and by the Italian project ”Ed-

iﬁci a Zero Consumo Energetico in Distretti Urbani

Intelligenti”.

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