Context-aware home energy saving based on Energy-Prone Context

Energy overuse has caused many environmental and economic issues, so energy saving for household is challenging and important for a smart home. For home energy saving based on context-awareness, human activity is critical information since knowing what activities are undertaken is important for judging if energy consumed by appliances is well spent by users. Such contextual information is an important clue for providing an energy saving service. However, most of the prior works on home energy saving often ignore those appliances which are operating indirectly or implicitly related to the context. These factors may compromise the practicality and acceptability of most of the currently available energy saving systems, thus failing to meet real user needs. Therefore, we propose utilizing an Energy-Prone Context to model a context and its associated energy consumption. In addition, we also propose a systematic method to determine energy-saving services based on the Energy-Prone Contexts. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.