Sensing and Feedback of Everyday Activities to Promote Environmentally Sustainable Behaviors

There is often a profound disconnect between our everyday behaviors and the effects those behaviors have on our health and the environment around us. My research focuses on the role of technology in bridging this disconnect—in particular, how technology can be used to effectively sense and visualize information about our own behaviors to promote awareness and enable positive behavior change. In this talk, I will provide an overview of my dissertation work on sensing and feedback systems for environmental behaviors, focusing on home resource consumption and personal transportation. These two domains account for a large percentage of an individual’s environmental footprint.

My work covers the entire spectrum of information flow: from sensing physical events, to intelligently interpreting and classifying this data, to building novel feedback interfaces that inform and motivate behavior. I will discuss the design and evaluation of UbiGreen, a mobile phone-based system that semi-automatically tracks personal transit behaviors such as bicycling or riding in a car, and feeds back this information continuously on the background of the mobile phone. I will also talk about HydroSense, which is the first water disaggregation system to automatically track water usage activities down to the fixture-level (e.g., upstairs shower vs. kitchen sink) from a single-point. Finally, I will discuss my current research on Reflect, a real-time ambient water usage feedback display for the home. Throughout the talk, I will interweave a design space of feedback technology that incorporates findings from behavioral and environmental psychology and human-computer interaction.