Redefining Micro-Moments for Improving Energy Behaviour: The SIT4Energy Approach

The critical deterioration of the environment in recent years has led to an increasing urgency of minimizing energy consumption. As residential and tertiary buildings hold a significant potential in terms of energy savings a lot of different approaches have been followed to not only reduce energy consumption but also change energy-related occupant behaviour for long-term results. Taking into account recommendation services through mobile applications, this paper proposes a more dynamic and occupant-centered solution, which not only offers useful energy related recommendations, but also adjusts the moment the recommendation is sent to maximize the receptiveness of the user in order to achieve the optimal energy behavior change. These moments are redefined micro-moments in terms of energy behavior change and occur when three factors' conditions coincide, the location, the physical and the mobile activity of the user. We develop a mobile application which can monitor them and detect a potential micro-moment, when a notification could be pushed to the user. The location is periodically collected from the device's sensors, the physical activity is inferred with the use of Google Activity Recognition API, while the mobile activity is inferred utilizing mobile event triggers and usage statistics. The experimental results show that our dynamic approach is justified, since the micro-moments are highly unpredictable and user-specific.