Demo Abstract: Saving Energy in Commercial Buildings through Social Gaming

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). UbiComp’13 Adjunct, September 8–12, 2013, Zurich, Switzerland. ACM 978-1-4503-2215-7/13/09. Abstract Energy consumption in commercial buildings is tremendous, resulting in significant monetary cost and waste of natural resources. Designing a low-cost system that serves the goal of saving energy while not forcing people to compromise their personal comfort is important for future smart commercial buildings. Proactive energy saving actions from users in the buildings are the key to achieving this goal. In this paper, we present Mahalo, an energy saving system, which leverages users through social gaming. By incentivizing energy saving actions from end users with a sensing-based feedback control system, the system reduces installation needs and improves understanding of the users preferences.