spotlight aims to raise awareness of personal resource consumption

The ongoing natural resource crisis, in particular, motivates us to develop innovative ways of conserving the resources. We believe most people have the will to conserve nature’s gifts but that they need timely and personalized information to help them do the right thing. Positive feedback that provides individual resource consumption for each person, along with the appropriate contextual information, is necessary. To this end, we propose to develop a per-user based natural resource consumption profiler, SpotLight. For SpotLight to be a viable solution, three main components are essential; a) scalable natural resource monitoring sub-systems for electricity, water, gas, and others, b) activity identification sub-systems, c) and a resource management sub-system that maps resource consumption according to users. In this research, we address the technical challenges for the system and each of its sub-systems, and explore how technology aids people in their resource conservation.