Until now, we’ve thought about energy as ‘always on’ and little thought is applied to when we use energy and what the economic impact is. However, the economics of energy are changing.  Utility companies are remodeling the way energy is distributed and priced. At the centre of this change is the Smart Grid. Building on the current electrical grid, the smart grid integrates smart meter technology which are in home monitors that aggregate electrical use and pricing by time of day by each appliance. As energy suppliers begin to integrate variable pricing based on demand and availability, there is a need for new technologies and tools to allow consumers to understand the economic impact of their energy use in much more details.

General Electric is leading the way for consumer energy management systems. In 2011, they will be launching Nucleus, GE Brillion’s first home energy monitor. Nucleus is a small device that plus into any electrical outline in a home. The device then communicates wirelessly with smart appliances in the home and energy companies and then transmits data back to the homeowner’s computer or iPhone. Consumers can then see detailed information on their real time energy use, current electricity rates, and historical usage over time.

Often times, the idea of Personal Metrics is only associated with taking feedback about your behavior and making changes that only affect your lifestyle and environment. But, it is exciting to see the idea of Personal Metrics begin to influence and integrate into a community. One central element of Personal Metrics is competition as a means of motivation. Such models of group goals and competition have emerged in the area of weight loss as groups of people whether from a family, company, or social group compete against each other to see which group can achieve the most weight loss. It would be interesting to see if the same principle could be applied to energy consumption. I’m curious if the pilot program involves any type of social gaming. Could a pilot program be designed where early adopter cities compete against each other to see the lowest aggregate energy use or bill? What would be an appropriate reward in such a program? It will be interesting to see what types of strategies are applied to encourage consumer adoption of the Nucleus.

To learn more about Nucleus and communities participating in pilot programs, visit General Electric.

I remember how fascinated I was the first time I read Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About The Bike. I was amazed to learn how much of a team effort the sport of professional cycling really is. I had no idea of the elaborate group effort that is required for one to win the Tour de France. I thought that everyone just got on the bikes and rode like hell. If you’re not familiar with how it all works, here’s a little background …

In the Tour de France, there are teams of riders. On each team, there is a designated team leader whom the rest of the riders are responsible for protecting from others, drafting from the wind, and keeping them in the best possible position during all stages of the race. Each team has different types of riders: climbers, time trialists, sprinters, domestiques, and all-rounders. The purpose of most of these is obvious, but the domestique requires a bit of explanation.

In French, the word domestique means “servant” … and in cycling, it means exactly that. The domestique serves the team. He leads in front to push away air and allow his teammates to draft behind him and conserve energy. He goes to the support cars to pick up food and water and deliver it to his teammates. If another rider on his team has technical problems with his bike, he will even give a teammate his bike or wheel. The domestique is agile, aggressive, and actionable. But most important, the domestique is an excellent listener.

Each team has a support car that carries the team’s directors who serve as the lifeline for the team. Using two way radios, they “track the race with onboard televisions, and take mobile phone calls from other directors to arrange temporary alliances as a day’s events unfold”. Radio communication did not become a part of the Tour de France until the mid 1990’s. Over the years, radio communication has changed racing. Some say that it takes the spontaneity and delicate skill of reading a race out of the sport.

Regardless of the debate in the cycling community, there are lessons to be learned when it comes to changing behavior using personal metrics. In cycling, riders used to only have the information from their on-board bike computers. Their actions were primarily based on the information that was known about themselves. But now, team directors can interpret the information from the rider, but more importantly, bench it against information from the race group as a whole, and then provide precise actions the rider should take. Behavior change is not just about collecting information, it’s about interpreting that information and developing action plans.

Drawing parallels from the cycling world, here are 3 recommendations for to use when using information to drive action:

1. Be a part of a team
When you’re trying to change your behavior, surround yourself with a small group of people who have similar goals. Not only will they motivate you, but if you can share your metrics you create accountability amongst yourselves. It’s important to keep the team small because as groups get larger, it’s easier to stay anonymous and be less vulnerable.

2. Have an expert plan your steps
Just as a rider relies on his team director to tell him when he should sprint or how long to draft, you need someone or something to help plan your next step. These are really what I call feedback loops. Automatic feedback loops are most effective. For example, in some weight loss applications where you track food consumed and activity done, you can have the system alert you (via email or text) when you have eaten too much or exercised too little. As you measure your activity, have an expert (whether human or a computer) that helps you know what to do next.

3. Understand the effects of your actions
Having constant real time feedback is essential to reinforcing the action you take. In cycling, the riders take cues from the team director. But, they also have the on-board computer that can provide them with immediate feedback about the effects of their actions. Being able to gauge the effect of an action helps to affirm in your mind that the action was either positive or negative. This helps you learn so that someday you don’t need the expert to plan your steps because you intuitively will learn what action should be taken given certain information provided.

* Image from Road Bike Action Magazine.

Personal Metrics isn’t just about how we as individuals change our actions and habits based on data about our behavior. It is also about how brands use the data trails our behavior produces to help tailor their products and services to our needs and lifestyles.

Freeband Communication is a Dutch national research program that is focused on the area of ambient intelligent communication. The foundation of their research is based on the idea that we are on the verge of a shift that will “move the center of information control to the individual.” The result of this control will be that sensors and intelligent electronics will monitor or behavior and then adap our environment to reflect our real time needs. Freeband refers to this as “an ambient intelligent environment”.

To help illustrate the idea, Freeband commissioned Martijn Hogenkamp (an Amsterdam based motion director and designer) to develop this video: The Ambient Life.

A serious health care crisis is the horizon. The aging population will soon be faced with a significantly understaffed medical system. To help deal with this shortage and increase access to preventative medicine, medical professionals are turning to technologies that can improve patient care.

At the heart of this development is a concept called Ambient Assisted Living. By placing passive sensors throughout living spaces, data can be collected that medical professionals can then use to monitor the health and activity of patients. About this idea, the Globe & Mail writes, “Emerging technology can be used to detect everything from a seizure to whether a senior has left the stove on.”

The challenge in the idea of remote health monitoring lies in society’s adoption which begins with the media professionals. Although they are quick to realize the benefits, there is of course government approval that can often slow down adoption. In Canada, the population over 65 will increase by 126 percent between 2000 and 2030. However, the government is not funding any type of assisted living research programs.

Medical professionals in Canada are faced with a government that is disinterested in ambient assisted living, those at the forefront of research and technology see things differently:

“It’s simply a matter of when, not if, these products make it into the home,” says Alex Mihailidis, an associate professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in the development of intelligent home systems for elder care and wellness and director of the school’s Intelligent Assistive Technology and Systems Lab. “I think the acceptability of these technologies is increasing every day because people are realizing that the technology can help keep them at home.”

Though there is opposition and slow adoption of ambient assisted living, its integration into our lives in imminent. Society seems to have had little problem with actively making very personal information publicly available through our participation in online activities. Now, we need to consider how technology can help monitor our actively in a more passive way and what lasting and life changing benefits this could bring.

Globe & Mail: Sensors, remote monitoring could improve quality of life for seniors

A generation exists that has never experienced life without the Internet. They are always connected, always communicating, and most important, always creating. Participation is a thing of the past. This generation is not passive. They are active creators who demand custom and personal experiences from the products and services they invite into their lives.

The creation driven generation is being raised in an unprecedented culture of change. One of the areas that is poised to require the most change is education. Today, education is not about an institution, but rather it is become an eco-system within our communities.

The KnowledgeWorks Foundation recently released the 2020: Forcast: Creating the Future of Learning. The report outlines the key drivers of change that are affecting education as we know it. One of the biggest drivers of change is the idea of Knowledge in terms of where we get information and what we do with that information.

Knowledge is changing from definitive ideas to the idea of discovery. As the amount of information continues to proliferate, there is an immediate need to develop new tools for both visualizing data, identifying patterns, and deriving meaning. The report develops the idea of “data trails” as both our online and offline activities will be tracked and monitored.

“Social media and collaborative tools will leave “data trails” of people’s online interactions — including contributions to group activities, inquiries and searches, skills, digital resources, and preferences (such as playlists, buddy lists, and topics tracked) — and social networks. At the same time, sensors and global positioning systems in devices such as cell phones and car navigation systems will be able to capture location-based information along with health and environmental data. Together these tools will provide a robust, visible “data picture” of our lives as citizens, workers, and learners. Families, learners, educators, and decision-makers will need to become sophisticated at pattern recognition in order to create effective and differentiated learning experiences and environments.”

The ultimate challenge lies in not simply finding information, but training ourselves to make the information meaningful. To accomplish this, education needs to focus on developing students in the areas of visual literacy, pattern recognition, critical thinking, and sensemaking. At the core of the new learner’s skillset is the idea of discovery. Traditionally, education has been focused on the definitive, but today, it needs to be re-framed around the idea of developing a generation who understands how to draw their own insight and develop action through discovery.

At some point in our lives, we’ve all had errors in judgment.  We make decisions and act without truly identifying the problem, weighting the alternatives, and understanding the consequences. As a result, our lives are shaped by decisions made with only partial information and what feels right.

This disadvantaged decision making is most prevalent in our personal lives. Why is this? If we are sick, our doctor runs tests to determine the cause of our illness and identify the appropriate course of treatment. When our car breaks down, our mechanic examines the systems in the vehicle to understand what parts to replace. Tests are run, facts are gathered, and analysis is done. Why can’t the same rigorous and quantitative approach be applied to our personal lives?

The reason is that in our personal lives, we don’t often care to acknowledge, let alone identify, problems in our lives. Therefore, the measurement and tracking our personal activity and behavior needs to be framed around discovery and not definition.

In his recent New York Times Magazine article “The Data-Driven Life“, Gary Wolf explores how our behavior  is changing as technology advances are allow our daily activities to be recorded, analyzed, and interpreted. Until recently, the idea of tracking one’s activities and deriving meaning was a manual and time consuming process. However, as Wolf points out, four things have changed:

“First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a globally superintelligence known as the cloud.”

Although these advances  afford us a greater ability to record activities, there is one challenge that exists: the challenge of adoption. Up until now, the general population hasn’t engaged in such discovery because such activity hasn’t been easily integrated into every day life. As I’ve previously written, tools like Fitbit, Toyota Prius, and Nike+ are all helping us adopt a lifestyle of discovery.

As more products and services are designed around the idea of discovery, we will learn to make more informed decisions because we will come to expect feedback that helps us understand the effects of our actions. Making more informed decisions doesn’t have to be about understanding the specific problem, it is about learning to reason, think critically, and see the patterns of our behavior.

New York Times Magazine: The Data-Driven Life

At the heart of Personal Metrics is the need for persuasion, whether aligning a new idea, adopting a new attitude, or modifying their behavior.

BJ Fogg coined the idea of Captology, which is the study of computers and their use as persuasive technologies. As Founder & Director of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, Fogg helps create insight into how computers and technology can be designed to change what people believe and what they do.

When designing products and experiences that bring change in an individual’s life or lifestyle, we first must persuade them to agree that a change is necessary. Next, in order to act out the change, the activity to be done must be within their range of ability.

To increase a person’s ability, Fogg finds there are two things you can do. First, train people, and give them more skills. Or, second, make the behavior easier to do. However, as human beings, we are often resistant to change and don’t allow enough discipline to train and learn new skills. As a result, to change behavior, designers must make the behavior easier to do. Fogg refers to this as Simplicity.

“Simplicity is not a characteristic of the product. It is a perception that we have of the experience in accomplishing the task.” – BJ Fogg

In his video BJ Fogg On Simplicity he outlines 6 facets of simplicity which include: Time, Money, Physical Effort, Brain Cycles, Social Deviance, and Non-Routine. These facets change in importance and influence for each individual because, as Fogg points out, “simplicity is a function of your scarcest resources at that moment”. Fogg is conducting further research into developing Simplicity Profiles that can help designers and companies understand how to create products and services that are tailored to overcoming their customers scarcest resources.

The idea of Personal Metrics is successful if there is a change in thought and behavior. After an individual’s thought process is changed, the challenge lies in executing the new behavior. By adopting the idea of Simplicity, the behavior to be carried out may not be different, but the individual’s perception of their ability to do so can change. Ultimately, this perception in ability is often the key element needed for a change in behavior to occur.