Gamification in building automation - the Human in the loop in a Cyber-Physical System

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Joana Páris Alves Monteiro
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/83514
• topic: Internet of Things; Cyber-Physical Systems; Building Automation Systems; Human-in-the-Loop; Gamification; Energy Efficiency; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

Nowadays, the number of intelligent environments has been increasing, as have their energy needs. It has become quite common to find buildings with interconnected components and automated systems implemented in order to create an environment with perfect conditions, maximizing the comfort of its users and minimizing energy consumption. However, not all infrastructures are prepared to accommodate such systems, which sometimes leads to the need for human intervention. Unfortunately, due to their lack of interest in achieving the system’s goals, the level of reliability of the individuals can be low, which can cause system malfunctions. Nonetheless, there are many examples of systems where human engagement could be improved with gaming techniques. This type of techniques, known as gamification, turn common tasks into engaging activities. Even though we have found a variety of gamified systems examples, we did not find studies that implemented a building automated systems, with a human-in-the-loop, in a retrofitting environment. Therefore, we created our study to assess if gamified Office Automation Systems can be used to encourage interaction with the system and to improve users’ habits. The final product was LabRats, a gamified system adapted to our environment and tested to determine if gamification techniques can be used to encourage and strengthen the connection to the system, and also to motivate its users to adopt energy saving routines. With the implementation of LabRats, we can observe that there was an increase in participation, that led not only to a reduction in energy consumption but also to a change in the habits of the occupants.