2014 IEEE Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP)

Symposium on Smart Grids

Singapore, 2124 April 2014

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Rie Tanaka

Mischa Schmidt

Christer hlund

Yuri Takamatsu

C&C Innovation Initiative,

NEC Corporation, Japan
r-tanaka@ak.jp.nec.com

NEC Laboratories Europe,

Germany
mischa.schmidt@neclab.eu

Lule University of
Technology, Sweden
christer.ahlund@ltu.se

NEC Scandinavia, Sweden

yuri.takamatsu@emea.nec.c
om

Abstract The SmartCity concept is becoming widely

accepted and describes the usage of ICT for increased quality of
life and also for a sustainable usage of natural resources. This
paper describes a system architecture for monitoring of electrical
energy consumption, and visualization of usage patterns to raise
users awareness of their energy usage which we field trialled
over several months. The information collected of each household
includes kWh, emission of carbon dioxide emissions and it also
relates a households consumption to other households attending
the trial. Our results indicate that a fraction of the participants
was interested in a detailed comparison with others whereas
other participants had their main interest in not performing
worse than the average household. Further, a large fraction had a
demand for knowing the total energy usage of their household
through an easily accessible visualization. These results indicate
that there is support to embed sensing and feedback services to
daily life for involving the residents of a SmartCity more.
Keywordssmart city; sensing; viualization;

I.

INTRODUCTION

The Smart City concept is becoming widely accepted and

describes the optimization needs of resources in city
environments [1]. Today, 50% of the population lives in cities
and predictions estimate that by 2050 this share will have
increased to 70%. Natural resources need to be preserved,
implying a fostering of the efficiency with which e.g. water and
energy are used by cities. Additionally, the negative effects of
carbon dioxide and other emissions on the environment
negatively have to be reduced. In this context, ICT perceived as
an enabler to assist in meeting these challenges.
With a modern society spreading, energy consumption will
increase. In this paper, we explicitly explore the ability to
impact the usage of electricity with the rationale that many
households are presently not aware of where and with what
fraction electricity is being consumed. Conserving electricity
while maintaining lifestyle quality demands that households
need exactly this awareness. In order to gain this insight, realtime monitoring and visualization of the results must be offered
to the household tenants. The SenseSmartCity project [2]
addresses new and improved ICT solutions that instrument
urban areas to gather and combine information, such as energy,
traffic, weather, events, activities, needs and opinions. This
paper presents the architectural design and a trial carried out in
a number of households in the city of Skellefte offering the

aforementioned monitoring and visualization capabilities. The

aim of the trial was to evaluate the architectural design
assessing the power consumption as well as how the
knowledge gained by households affected their usage patterns
of the monitored equipment. Our hypothesis was that an
increased awareness of the electrical energy consumption
would render in decreased usage. Devices like the washing and
dishing machines, TV sets and computers were chosen to be
monitored and their energy consumption patterns were
visualized. The experiment was carried out for the duration of 8
months.
II.

RELATED WORK

Energy consumption of home and its reduction are attracted

attention in many countries and several trial or design for
motivating energy efficient behavior of people had conducted
in several research areas. [3] focuses on feedback of energy
consumption to people and defines ten dimensions of feedback
technology with viewpoints of human-computer interaction and
environmental and behavioral psychology. This research has
weight on human computer interaction aspect such as
frequency or presentation medium of information rather than
content of information itself. In contrast we focus on what kind
of information is most effective to people.
[4] documents a prior experiment carried out in Japan in
order to examine whether visualization of peoples energy
consumption had an effect on peoples behavior related to
energy saving activities. In that experiment the system called
Eco-MAME: Ecological platform for Motivating Activities
with Mutual Effect was used for obtaining energy
consumption data and visualizing them. As a result there was a
relationship between views of visualization and reduction of
energy consumption in the observed Japanese households that
participated in the experiment.
In another study, psychological research of relation
between attitude for power saving and visualization effect of
other's saving behavior was conducted with 3,000 people in
Japan using questionnaires [5]. The analysis result showed that
there were 6 motivational factors for saving energy:
economic (cost reduction), social (environmental
sustainability), praise expectation (to be praised about saving
activities), ashamed (NOT saving energy because of shame),
powerless (NOT saving energy because thinking the

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978-1-4799-2843-9/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

activities have no effect), bother (NOT saving energy

because of botheration). For enhancing effectiveness of
visualization, we combined these 2 studies and use a novel
visualization system.

gateway is responsible to authenticate sensors. The gateway in

turn authenticates with the server via the AAA system to be
able to upload sensor information to the server. Sensor
information stored in the server is then available for service
providers that are authenticated and authorized to access this
information to build value added services. In this architecture,
handheld devices can both act as adding sensor information
and providing gateway functionality.

In [1] building blocks for Smart Cities addressing the

Internet of Things and Internet of Services are described. The
architecture designed, implemented and used in this trial
provides a real system implementation that demonstrated the
concept.

The composition of the trial system presented in this

paper follows the Sense Smart City architecture in the
following way (see figure 2):

Figure 1. Smart Sense City architecture

III.

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

Figure 1 depicts the architecture established in the city of

Skellefte in Sweden where arbitrary sensors connect to a
gateway. In the current version of the architecture, each

Installation of sensor nodes took place in power

outlets.
A gateway (the NEC Home Service Enabler, see
figure 3) placed in homes gathered sensor
information via wireless communication.
The citys fiber network provides the connectivity
between the deployed gateways and the server
platform (SenseSmartCity) located at the University
of Lule in Skellefte.
The SenseSmartCity system downloads power
consumption information for the trial households
from the energy provider SkellefteKraft [6] and
stores this information together with the sensor
information.
Eco-MAME extracts data from the SenseSmartCity
server to visualize and interact with the households
via the 6 motivational factors defined in [5].

We used AN158 sensors from EverSpring [7] for

measuring the power consumption in the electric outlets of
selected appliances, and equipped the NEC Home Service
Enabler (HSE) with an AeonLabs Z-Wave Stick 2 as radio
module [8] for communicating with the sensors. Each test-site
had 5 sensors installed measuring appliances like the TV,
washing machine, dishwasher, cloth drier, microwave and
refrigerator etc. For regularly reading the sensor data and

Figure 2. Smart Home Trial Architecture

Figure 3. The Home Service Enabler and tablet

sending it to the server, the HSE runs an OSGi bundle

developed specifically for the trial. This way, approximately
1500 bytes of data were transmitted via HTTP/JSON to the
server per minute for each household.

appliances and their fee. This visualization focuses

user attention on saving cost.

Social: A graph of percentage of saved energy as well

as an estimation of the reduction of CO2 emissions.
This focuses user attention on CO2 reduction and
protecting the environment.

Activity: A visualization displaying daily reductions

of this and other households. This visualization also
offers users to praise other users for their reduction
results.

Ranking: A display of positional relationships

between households using a marathon metaphor in
which the relative ranking is displayed by household
avatars running a marathon. The ranking is calculated
based on energy consumption reduction, aiming to
encourage people to do ecological activities in a
community.

Results: The energy savings of the users own

households, the other trial households and the total
energy savings of all participants are visualized using
a growing tree metaphor. This metaphor focuses on
illustrating users that the collaborative savings
achieved can be big even if individual energy savings
are relatively small.

Daily activity TIPS: Providing advice for saving

energy to household users.

Figure 3 shows the HSE used in the trial along with a

tablet used as user interface for accessing the Eco-MAME

Figure 4. The server design

service.
Figure 4 depicts the SenseSmartCity server platform. We
used the JAVA Script Object Notation (JSON) [9] accessing a
Representational State Transfer (REST) [10] interface for
communication with the HSE and Eco-MAME service.
For securing the interactions with the SenseSmartCity
server, the Sense Smart City AAA-server is hosting a MIT
Kerberos KDC (key distribution center) service that feeds both
HSEs and Eco-MAME with authentication facilities through
ticket exchange.
IV.

ECO-MAME

For data processing and visualization of energy

consumption Eco-MAME extracts information stored in the
SenseSmartCity server including a comparison with the other
trial households. Figure 5 depicts the information provided to
trial users via the tablet (see figure 3). This information
consists of:

Economics: A graph of saved money as well as an

estimation of the energy usage of the households

V.

EXPERIMENT

We conducted the trial experiment for 8 months, from

November 2012 to middle June 2013. 8 households
participated in the trial.
The energy data collected by the socket sensors were
sampled every 30 seconds, stored in a database on the
SenseSmartCity server and communicated hourly to EcoMAME for analysis. The analysis was then visualized hourly,
weekly and monthly for the users by Eco-MAME.
A. Results
The trial period began in November 2012 and lasted until
June 2013. The information on household energy consumption
collected during the first month was used as a baseline for the
Eco-MAME analysis. Our results base on the calculated
average (AVE) for which we excluded outliers in the data
(samples more than two standard deviations away from the
mean value).

Figure 5. Eco-MAMEs different means of motivating users based on [5]

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this affects the earth, to support the energy reduction in several

situations in the daily life.
Users also expressed the opinion that the accessibility to the
Eco-MAME web page should be made easier, e.g. by using a
Smartphone App or by integrating it with Social Networks like
Facebook for visualizing the results. These opinions indicate
that feedback methods or media should be more integrated with
the life style of the users.
VI.

Figure 6. Average reduction rate of energy consumption

CONCLUSION

As a trial in the Sense Smart City Project, we constructed a

platform to observe energy consumption in average households
through wireless sensors and visualize the data to users to
promote energy awareness. We conducted our experiment for 8
months with 8 households. The results show that most
participants could on average reduce energy consumption. Also,
we observed that there was a relationship between presenting
data to users and reducing energy consumption. From
interviews with trial participants we learned that some
participants had interests in comparing with others by rankings
and others were rather motivate to not performing worse than
the average participant. Most participants had an interest to
know their total energy usage in an easy to access visualized
form. These results indicate that we need to embed sensing and
feedback services into daily life in a natural style in order to
stimulate a high user involvement. For instance, it may be good
to use multiple media: summarized information on their energy
usage pattern might be pushed to a users smartphone and more
detailed information such as changes in consumption pattern,
consumption history and consumption trend could be shown in
a web browser in a pull-based information delivery manner.
The results presented are based on a limited study with eight
households and for a limited time. For future work the
presented approach needs to be applied to a bigger group of
tenants and with an increased amount of data for increased
validity of results. However the indication from this work is
that the hypothesis presented is valid.

Figure 7. Relationship between reduction rate and monthly page views

Figure 6 depicts the average monthly (including all eight

households) reduction rate of energy consumption of sensed
alliances in relation to the baseline in November. In almost all
periods except May 2013 participants could reduce the
consumption. Since most of sensed alliances are kinds of
alliances which are less influenced by change of climate, it
seems that the result reflect the effort of participants even if the
climate and temperature had changed through experiment
period.
Figure 7 shows the average reduction of energy
consumption in relation to the average number of monthly page
views of users accessing Eco-MAME. The graph indicates the
interest of Eco-MAME and how the information retrieved
affects the energy usage of devices monitored. The red line
represents a linear regression of the results and indicates that
the number of Eco-MAME user interactions had a positive
correlation with reduction of energy consumption.

REFERENCES
[1]

Smart Cities at the Forefront of the Future Internet, Jos M et al, Future
Internet Assembly, LNCS 6656, pp. 447462 (2011).
[2] http://sensesmartcity.org/
[3] Promoting Energy Efficient Behaviors in the Home through Feedback:
The Role of Human-Computer Interaction, Jon Froehlich, Proc. HCIC
Workshop. Vol. 9 (2009).
[4] "Eco-MAME": Ecology Activity Promotion System Based on Human
Psychological Characteristics, Rie Tanaka, Shinichi Doi, Taku Konishi,
Naoki Yoshinaga, Satoko Itaya and Keiji Yamada, SocInfo 2011,
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6984, pp. 324-327 (2011).
[5] Psychological research of relation between attitude for power saving and
visualization effect of other's saving behavior, Taku Konishi, Fumio
Murakami, Rie Tanaka, Satoko Itaya, Shinichi Doi and Keiji Yamada,
Proceedings of the 39th annual meeting of The Behaviormetric Society
of Japan, pp. 383-386 (2011).
[6] http://www.skekraft.se/default.aspx?di=1355
[7] http://www.everspring.com/
[8] http://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick
[9] http://www.json.org/
[10] Representational State Transfer (REST), Robert Richards, Pro PHP
XML
and
Web
Services,
pp.
633-672
(2006)

B. Interview results
We conducted a workshop at the end of the trial in June
2013. At the workshop, results from the experiment were
presented and the trial participants were asked for their
feedback regarding Eco-MAME. Some participants said that
they had an interest in the ranking using the marathon
metaphor, with the opinion that it was important not to perform
worse than the average. One participant used the measurements
to limiting children usage of the TV-set and computer.
Several participants had an interest to know the total energy
consumption, including the electrical power usage and energy
for heating (e.g. district heating). It is considered important to
calculate total energy consumption for the awareness of how