My Everyday Earth – Project Homepage

Index | Participative Sensing and Sustainability

The MyEverdayEarth (MEE) project explored the use of persuasive technologies to influence behaviour and to try and persuade end users to to reduce their enviromental impact.

We have run two full scale end users trials, the 1st was a trial across 6 BC universities/colleges, that encouraged students in residence to carry out actions that reduced their energy (specifically electricity) consumption. Organized byGoBeyond, the trial runs for a month as a competition every year.




A trial relied on a facebook application (MEE) and a mobile client that used gamification techniques to engage students in ‘challenges’ that caused them to reflect on and change behaviours.




During the competition, we saw electricity reduction of upto 25% in some university residences. A report on the MEE system and its use in the trial is here.




Friending Mother nature

A follow-on project in conjunction with Metro Vancouver Parks is exploring the use of persuasive technology to encourage youth to get out into and engage with local parks in the Metro area. We have developed a mobile game environment that builds on the MEE platform and supports downloadable mini-games that engage youths in park based activities.

A key part of the research is exploring not only social networking, but the use of participatory sensing to augment official data and help foster a sense of real world engagement. We have developed an air quality application that uses official Metro air quality data but mashes it up with user generated data from smartphones




We have been supported in these developments by Sense Tecnic Systems which has made available its technology to support our trials.




Older project information

The rest of the information on this page refers to earlier work on the MEE project (pre-2011) and is kept here for reference.

1. Overview

Current Working Name: MyEverydayEarth
Status: Currently this project is still in the requirements analysis stage.

We propose to develop a software prototype of a community sustainability application that exploits cloud computing, mobile devices and social networking to encourage and enable community users to share and exploit new green technologies.

Research has shown that sustainability initiatives, e.g. monitoring and reducing home energy consumption, works better when users ‘share and compare’, i.e. individuals participate in community groups allowing them to share ideas and approaches and to gauge their activities against others in their community [1,2].

To facilitate these types of sustainability communities we will develop a prototype application, focused on personal Carbon footprints that uses 3 key technologies. Wireless sensors and appropriate infrastructure to gather end user data, e.g. activity, transport usage, energy consumption etc. A cloud computing platform to integrate wide area sensor data and to provide a generic framework for harnessing heterogeneous green technologies. A social network application/plugin that enables end users to form sustainability communities and share data.

We will prototype this system using Nokia WiFi enabled devices such as the Nokia N series, our sensor infrastructure platform and the extensive UBC public Wifi infrastructure.

For a full description of the proposal, see this page: Description

2. People

Each project member can keep notes on these pages:

3. Meeting Minutes

Significant meetings have their minutes recorded here.

4. Risks List

5. Project Schedule

6. Coding and Document Formats and Templates

In this project we will use the following templates and formats for coding and documents.

Coding

  • default Java code format template in Eclipse. (Ctrl+Shift+f auto formats in Eclipse)
  • code reviews are to be used for any major changes (i.e.: you should not review your own code nor commit code unless it is reviewed)
  • when committing code the following template should be used:
     Summary: Your summary here.
     Reviewed by: Someobdy's Name
     Description:
     -optional list of
     -changes if a lot
     -of changes have been
     -made
  • we are also using com.sensetecnic.mee for our base package name in all code projects in My Everyday Earth

7. Requirements Documents

8. User Testing

9. Design

10.Links