The project eTEACHER aims at developing an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool-box to motivate energy behavioural change of energy end-users in buildings, providing tailored interventions that result in significant energy savings and better productivity, health and comfort level. Energy end-users (building occupants, visitors, facility manager, workers, academic…) are the target of social experts involved in the project, who research on the main factors that influence the energy behaviour, the most suitable techniques to motivate behaviour change and how energy indicators should be presented to make informed decisions that effectively increase the energy impact. With the conclusions of the social research and the continuous monitoring of ICT developments under the social approach, the different components of the platform are defined and integrated.
The overall goal of eTEACHER is to empower energy end-users to achieve energy savings and improve the buildings comfort and health conditions through enabling behavioural change, considering different roles (visitors, facility managers, householder, owner, student, etc.) depending on the building they usually visit, live or work (residential and non-residential) and different strategies depending on the cultural and demographic indicators.
eTEACHER concept consists of encouraging and enabling energy behaviour change of building users by means of continuous interventions displayed through a set of empower tools to drive informed decisions in order to save energy and optimise indoor environment quality. These empower tools are a set of ICT solutions that ensures friendly connection in between end-users and building systems, implement continuous behavioral change interventions and provide tailored advice. The tools can be classified into BACS (Building Automation and Control Systems) add-ons and end-user friendly solutions. The BACS add-ons (What-if-Analysis, data processing and universal BACS/monitoring system interface) are responsible for collecting information from the building, pre-processing data to focus on relevant metrics related to the use of energy and indoor environmental quality, exploring potential energy conservation measures (ECMs) and post-processing data in order to present it in a way that can have more impact on users behavior.The user friendly solutions are energy efficiency and comfort advisor apps for end-users devices (mobiles, smartTV, smartwatch, dashboarding). These apps show the ECMs identified by BACS-addons and integrates ICT-based behavioural change techniques such as gamification (games, challenges, bonus system, energy literacy, energy visibility, etc.) according to different roles (visitors, facility managers, owner, etc.) as building users and according to cultural and demographic indicators. An important feature of the advisor apps is that they collect feedback from end-users regarding comfort and satisfaction that are used to customise ECMs and engagement techniques. The project is demonstrated in 12 real buildings located h 3 different climate conditions. The pilots located in Spain are 2 residential buildings, 2 schools and 2 health care centres. The pilots located in UK are an office building and a school. The Romania pilots are 4 residential buildings.
