Aging Population Attitudes to Sensor Controlled Home Energy

一般认为，无论是在个别建筑物层面或在社区层面的综合节能措施，都需要自动化，以维持对减少需求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的技术和社会问题。考虑到英国人口正在老龄化，而且这一人口结构将在未来几年占据主导地位，这一年龄组的态度以及他们投资和信任节能技术的意愿非常重要。这些态度现在和未来将形成的经验，燃料成本的一部分，国内预算和既定的技术偏见，APAtSCHE打算通过监测新技术与业主的参与研究。在英国能源价格上涨源于国内发电能力萎缩，增加对进口的依赖和增加化石燃料成本沿着相关的税收;这些价格上涨通过能源零售商转嫁到消费者身上，而零售商则通过批发能源价格的上涨来面对这些价格上涨。因此，燃料贫困正在成为英国社会更大部分的真实的威胁，因为许多家庭经济都由他们的能源预算主导。未来几年这一数字将如何增长，将成为APAtSCHE研究的一部分，该研究用于为硬件试验提供节能的潜在用途。虽然家庭能源使用是房屋存量结构和形式的函数，但居住在房屋中的人推动了能源需求，并且由于其本性，人们表现出受日常生活支配的自主特征。APAtSCHE提出，居住感测、自学习环境监测和信息控制界面的组合不仅有可能限制家庭负荷的变化，而且还可以提供必要的信息来量化其与部署技术有关的变化。目前，能源消耗的不透明性被认为是家庭效率低下的原因，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一个主要关切。突出整体家庭负荷的组成要素并将其映射到户主的实际活动的技术可以被视为建立对家庭自动化的信任的重要桥梁步骤。识别房间利用率或占用率并将其负载贡献分配给总仪表阅读将允许将家庭中的活动映射到特定的能量消耗水平。现有的产品，能源EGG，已经提供给公众，形成了这一领域的研究的硬件基础-这使用运动传感技术来检测当一个房间是空的，并使用其正在申请专利的技术，它区分用户坐着不动和一个空房间之前关闭电器关闭。让房主选择允许负载自动关闭时，他们不在财产或财产的一部分，可以产生一个节省成本，没有额外的努力对他们的一部分。APAtSCHE的一个研究流致力于改进占用率的测量，研究占用率的变化，并根据占用率量化自动化家庭负荷的成本效益。将传感器数据与家庭活动和电器控制的谓词统一起来需要用于自动存储、同化和分析的数据交换标准，这些标准将由APAtSCHE通过扩展当前的行业标准来开发，以提供用于自动控制开发的适当可视化以及用于理解在何处以及使用多少能量的直观和习惯形成线索，而不会成为住户日常生活的开销。

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.