Tailoring feedback to users' actions in a persuasive game for household electricity conservation

Abstract

Recent work has begun to focus on the use of games as a platform for energy awareness and eco-feedback research. While technical advancements (wireless sensors, fingerprinting) make timely and tailored feedback an objective within easy reach, we argue that taking into account the users' own personal consumption behavior and tailoring feedback accordingly is a key requirement and a harder challenge. We present a first attempt in this direction, EnergyLife, which is designed to support the users' actions and embeds contextualized feedback triggered by specific actions of the user, called 'smart advice'. We conclude by showing the results of a four-month trial with four households that returned promising results on the effectiveness and acceptance of this feature. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.