Aging Population Attitudes to Sensor Controlled Home Energy

人们普遍认为，无论是在单个建筑物一级还是在社区一级，节能措施都需要自动化，以保持对需求减少的持续和一致的反应。APATSCHE建议研究在老年人居住的社会住房中开发和部署家庭自动化技术所涉及的技术和社会问题。考虑到英国人口正在老龄化，这一年龄段的人的态度以及他们投资和信任节能技术的意愿非常重要，而且这一人群将在未来几年占据主导地位。现在和未来的这些态度将受到经验、燃料成本占国内预算的比例以及既定的技术偏见的影响，APATSCHE打算通过监测新技术与房主的接触来研究这些偏见。英国能源价格上涨的原因是国内发电能力萎缩，对进口的依赖增加，以及化石燃料成本以及相关税收的增加；这些价格上涨通过能源零售商通过能源批发价格的上涨来转嫁给消费者。因此，燃料贫困正成为英国社会更大一部分人面临的真正威胁，因为许多家庭经济由他们的能源预算主导。这将如何在未来几年增加将成为APATSCHE的一项研究的一部分，该研究用于为硬件试验提供节能的潜在有用性的信息。虽然家庭能源使用是住房存量的结构和形式的函数，但居住在住房中的人驱动对能源的需求，并由他们的性质决定，人们表现出受他们日常生活支配的自主特征。APATSCHE提出，占有率感知、自我学习环境监测和信息控制界面的组合不仅有可能限制国内负荷的变化，还可以提供必要的信息，以量化其相对于所部署技术的变化。目前，能源消耗的不透明性质被认为是家庭效率低下的一个原因，因为行为与能源使用无关，而在能源使用的定性研究中，失去控制往往被认为是国内能源客户的关键担忧。强调家庭总负荷的构成要素并将这些要素与户主的实际活动相对应的技术可以被视为在建立对家庭自动化的信任方面至关重要的桥梁步骤。确定房间的使用率或占有率，并将其负荷分配到整个仪表读数，将使家庭中的活动能够映射到特定的能源消耗水平。已向公众开放的现有产品能量蛋构成了这一研究领域的硬件基础--该产品使用运动传感技术来检测房间是否空着，并使用其正在申请专利的技术来关闭电器，该技术在关闭电器之前区分用户坐着不动和空着的房间。允许房主在他们不在房产或房产的一部分时自动关闭负载的选项，可以节省成本，而不需要他们做出额外的努力。APATSCHE的一个研究方向致力于改进入住率的测量，研究入住率的可变性，并量化基于入住率实现家庭负荷自动化的成本效益。要将传感器数据与家庭活动和家电控制的预测统一起来，APATSCHE将通过扩展当前的行业标准来开发用于自动存储、同化和分析的数据交换标准，以便为自动控制的开发提供适当的可视化，并提供直观和习惯的线索，以了解在哪里以及有多少能源被使用，而不会成为家庭日常工作的负担。

It is generally accepted that energy saving measures whether at the individual building level or aggregated up to the community level need to be automated in order to maintain a sustained and consistent response to demand reduction. APAtSCHE proposes to look at the technical and social issues surrounding developing and deploying home automation technologies in social housing inhabited by senior citizens. The attitudes of this age group and their willingness to invest in and trust energy saving technology are very important given that the UK population is aging and that this demographic will come to dominate in years to come. These attitudes now and in the future will be shaped by experience, fuel costs as a proportion of domestic budget and established technology prejudices, which APAtSCHE intends to study through monitoring the engagement of novel technology with homeowners.Rising energy prices in the UK have stemmed from shrinking domestic generation capacity, increased reliance on imports and increasing fossil fuel costs along with associated levies; these price rises are passed onto the consumer through energy retailers who face these through an increase in wholesale energy prices. As a consequence, fuel poverty is becoming a real threat to a larger sector of UK society as many household economies are dominated by their energy budgets. How this will increase in the coming years will form part of a study in APAtSCHE used to inform hardware trials of the potential usefulness of energy savings.While domestic energy use is a function of the structure and form of the housing stock, the people who live in the housing drive the demands for energy and by their nature, people exhibit autonomous traits that are governed by their routines. APAtSCHE proposes that a combination of occupancy sensing, self learning environmental monitoring and informative control interfaces has the potential to not only constrain variation in domestic load, but provide the necessary information to quantify its changes with respect to the deployed technology.Presently, the opaque nature of energy consumption is cited as a reason for household inefficiencies as behaviour cannot be related to energy use, while loss of control was often cited as a key concern of domestic energy customers in qualitative studies of energy use. Technologies which highlight constituent elements of the overall domestic load and map these to actual activities of the householder could be seen as a vital bridging step in establishing trust in home automation. Identifying room utilization or occupancy and apportioning its load contribution to an overall meter reading would allow activities in the home to be mapped to a particular level of energy consumption. An existing product, the Energy EGG, already available to the public, forms the hardware basis of this area of research - this uses motion sensing technology to detect when a room is empty and switches off appliances using its patent pending technology which differentiates between a user sitting still and an empty room before it switches appliances off. Giving homeowners the option of allowing loads to be switched off automatically when they are not in the property or in part of the property, can produce a cost saving with no additional effort on their part. One research stream in APAtSCHE is dedicated to improving the measurement of occupancy, studying occupancy variability and quantifying the cost benefit of automating domestic loads on the basis of occupancy. Unifying sensor data with the predicates of household activity and appliance control requires data interchange standards for automated storing, assimilation and analysis which will be developed by APAtSCHE by extending current industry standards, to provide appropriate visualization for automated control development and intuitive and habit forming cues for understanding where and how much energy is being used without it becoming an overhead on householders' daily routine.