Spotlight: Focusing on Energy Consumption of Individuals

We present Spotlight, a novel application that monitors electrical energy consumption at the individual level. Ob- taining reports of energy consumption at this fine granu- larity allows identifying new areas for energy saving and acting upon it in real-time. Spotlight views appliances as rendering a service to a user and the energy consumption associatedwith theapplianceasa costfor theservice. Each participatingappliance is specified a service range, a phys- ical vicinity from the appliance within which the user ben- efits from the service. Using radio receive strength from user-wearable active RFID tags, an applianceis able to de- termine the users in its service range. In order to make these measurements, each appliance is instrumented with a power meter and an active RFID tag reader. The current implementation of Spotlight uses a COTS power meter and MicaZ motes as active RFID tags and readers. The Spotlight system is deployed and tested in an exper- imental setup with various appliances and users. We eval- uate multiple schemes of accounting energy consumption based on an individual's movement profile and the appli- ances' power profile. Our preliminary results show how the system could detect wasted energy and we discuss interest- ingindividualbehaviorthatcouldbeinterpretedforvarious energy optimizations. as well as a solution for saving energy. The traditional di- mensionsmeasuretheconsumptionat averycoarse-grained granularity. The consumption is given in terms of house- hold and over a period of many days. This allows for only a partial awareness on the part of the users about their en- ergy consumption. In such settings, if measurement of en- ergy consumption was made available at a finer granularity, it would help users in pinpointing specific habits or trends, modifying which would aid in significant improvements in energy consumption. Different agencies in the EuropreanUnion have initiated