Hero at Home
People worldwide are spending their days at home. This is a new challenge for everybody, for our health and our job. #HeroAtHome is the new social campaign launched jointly by four EU projects to show how we can be heroes in the comfort of our homes.
Companies all over the world are rolling out mandatory work-from-home policies to tackle the current COVID-19 emergency; and those who are not working remotely, are anyway spending most of their time at home. What's sure is that everybody is new to this lockdown situation and we all have most probably to adapt our habits to the new setting. The current emergency is challenging our mental and physical health, our work productivity and, last but not least, our energy bill. Indeed, spending more time at home means also using more energy than usual.
To help you figure out how to overcome this unprecedented situation, the four European projects MOBISTYLE, Utilitee, TripleA-reno and eTEACHER are launching the social campaign #HeroAtHome.
From ventilating your home to unplugging electronic devices, from paying attention to ergonomics to the need to keep your thermostat down, the four projects will provide helpful and simple tips to help you save energy and stay healthy and productive in the time of coronavirus.
The campaign will pose questions and provide simple tips through real-life pictures, encouraging messages, and graphic animation. Dedicated Twitter @Hero_atHome and Instagram @Hero_At_Home accounts were opened to share our heroes' stories and feel less isolated and more united.
So instead of letting the situation overwhelm you, follow our stories and share your #HeroAtHome side with our community, others could benefit from your advice.
Take part, be a hero.
BUILD UP Portal: http://www.buildup.eu/
The BUILD UP web portal is intended to reap the benefits of Europe's collective intelligence on energy reduction in buildings for all relevant audiences. The portal will bring together new practitioners and professional associations while motivating them to exchange best working practices and knowledge and to transfer tools and resources.
Project: Exceed
The ExcEED project -which stands for European Energy Efficient building district Database: from data to information to knowledge – takes the pulse of the actual energy consumed by last generation of buildings. The project answers the need for transparency and comparability of energy performance calculations. The scope of ExcEED is to create a European database for measured and qualitative data on beyond the state-of-the-art buildings and districts. Key performance indicators (KPIs) were developed to quantify and benchmark the energy efficiency and the environmental quality at building and district level. Advanced tools and KPIs are associated to the database to analyse real energy performance and environmental quality at the level of single building/district, geo-cluster of buildings, and European new or renovated building stock.
Project website: http://www.exceedproject.eu/
Project: GreenSoul
GreenSoul pursues higher energy efficiency in public buildings by altering the way people use energy consuming shared devices (lights, printers) and personal devices (personal pluggable appliances). For that, it applies a twofold strategy: 1)persuades users to increase their energy-awareness and change their e-consumption habits and 2)embeds intelligence in the devices to let them autonomously decide about their operation mode for energy efficiency purposes. For the first part, it will use a variety of techniques, from persuasive social applications to physical interaction mechanisms linked to the devices. For the second part, it will learn from the usage habits, acting only when an energy wasteful behaviour is detected or the users do not heed the devices' suggestions. The aim is to add a green-soul to devices in a pluggable manner to avoid costly replacement of equipment and the corresponding disposal of old-fashioned devices to the landfill.
Project website: http://www.greensoul-h2020.eu/
The main aim of the TELMI project is to study how we learn musical instruments, taking the violin as a case study, from a pedagogical and scientific perspective and to create new interactive, assistive, self-learning, augmented-feedback, and social-aware systems complementary to traditional teaching.
Project: People-Centred Development Approaches in Practical and Learning Environmnets (PEOPLE) - Erasmus+ (Knowledge Alliances 2016)
The project focuses on the mismatch between qualifications gained by humanities and social science students and skills expected from graduates by employers in industry. Particularly in the fields of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and related disciplines, a lack of practical experiences among recent graduates often diminishes their employability in the industry sector and contributes to high overall rates of unemployment among youth in the European Union. The main goal of the project is the development, implementation, and evaluation of a new model of knowledge transfer between higher education and industry. Interdisciplinary teams of students formed in the PEOPLE project will use different people-centred development approaches to test and improve existing products or services and to seek new development solutions for the industry.
Project website: www.people-project.net
Project: ChArGED
ChArGED stands for CleAnweb Gamified Energy Disaggregation. It addresses the energy consumption in public buildings and proposes a framework that aims to facilitate achieving greater energy efficiency and reductions of wasted energy in public buildings. The framework leverages IoT enabled, low-cost devices (NFC or iBeacons) to improve energy disaggregation mechanisms that provide energy use and -consequently- wastages at the device, area and end user level. These wastages are targeted by a gamified application that feeds personalized real-time recommendations to each individual end user.
Project website: http://www.charged-project.eu/
Project: enCOMPASS
enCOMPASS aims to implement and validate an integrated socio-technical approach to behavioural change for energy saving. This, by developing innovative user-friendly digital tools for making energy data consumption available and understandable for the different users and stakeholders (residents, employees, pupils, building managers, utilities, ICT providers). And by empowering them to collaborate to achieve energy savings and manage their energy needs in energy efficient, cost-effective and comfort-preserving ways.
Project website: http://www.encompass-project.eu/
Project: ENTROPY
The ENTROPY project aims to design and deploy an innovative IT ecosystem. This will target at improving energy efficiency through consumers understanding, engagement and behavioural changes. The project will focus on the collection of energy-related information from heterogeneous data sources, the proper analysis of the available data and the provision of interactive services, applications and serious games to end users for stimulating their interest for energy efficient activities, recommending actions for adopting more energy efficient lifestyles and increasing their overall energy consumption awareness.
Project website: http://entropy-project.eu/
Project: GAIA
The GAIA project aims to promote positive behavioural changes within communities regarding energy consumption/awareness. The activities will consist of the gamification of real-time, IoT-enhanced energy consumption metrics in trial schools located in Italy, Greece and Sweden.
Project website:http://gaia-project.eu/index.php/en/homepage-3/
Project: GreenPlay
The overall objective of the GreenPlay project is to raise awareness among citizens through the implementation of a real time monitoring energy consumption platform and the development of a serious game.
Project website: http://www.greenplay-project.eu/
Project: Peakapp
The PEAKapp project targets the development of an unprecedented ICT -to- Human ecosystem. The app aims to:
- - Trigger lasting energy savings in households through behavioral change and continuous engagement,
- - Enable increased consumption of clean and low-priced electricity from renewable energy sources,
- - Connect customers to Facebook,
- - Motivate customers through an integrated serious game,
- - Boost the efficacy of Smart Home building energy management systems by integrating their functionalities into the PEAKapp solution
Project website: http://www.peakapp.eu/