A system for collecting activity annotations for home energy management

Home energy management is becoming increasingly important and, though there are a plethora of tools for accessing energy consumption data, few provide concrete insights that can directly help users manage demand. Mechanisms that enable a user to draw connections between activities and energy consumption by attaching contextual labels to energy events are a promising step; however solutions for collecting annotations from users can be error prone or intrusive. This work presents a system for collecting in situ annotations using a smartphone application coupled with an off-the-shelf home energy measurement infrastructure. We use a novel power profiling approach to identify important energy consumption events and solicit contextual annotations from the user via a push notification sent to a smartphone. Using a five-week study performed in five homes, we show that our power profiling approach can identify a significant percentage of important energy consumption events using a very small number of monitored devices. We were able to collect an average of over 2 annotations per day and while users provided a wide range of annotations, the motivation to provide annotations varied across subjects.