IoT-Enabled Adaptive Context-Aware and Playful Cyber-Physical System for Everyday Energy Savings

Home energy savings via eco-feedback is often considered a serious, tedious, or even distracting task due to the need for frequent human intervention. In addition, most existing eco-feedback systems focus on providing energy usage information and ignore the users' contexts. This may render the systems incapable of capturing the users' changes when proenvironmental behaviors have been encouraged. To address this, our study leverages Internet of Things (IoT) enabled technologies to realize an adaptive, context-aware, and playful cyber-physical system (CPS) for everyday energy savings with the hope of facilitating collaboration between a person and a smart energy-saving (ES) system to the greatest extent possible. To leverage the benefits inherent in a CPS, bidirectionally interactive information visualization integrated with pet-raising gamification was incorporated into the adaptive CPS. This synchronized the information from the user's physical environment with its counterpart in the pet's virtual environment. In order to provide flexible services, all IoT devices were agentized to form reconfigurable agents. In our experimental evaluation, this bidirectional mapping empowered users to flexibly control remote appliances anywhere and anytime in a more natural way, which enabled users to embed interactions with the ES CPS into their daily routine. Furthermore, improvements to system adaptability (33% in precision; 21% in recall) along with the reconfigurable ES services (additionally saving energy about 16.21%) show the potential of the CPS to enhance the users' experience and prolong the users' engagement in everyday energy savings.