EcoHomeHelper: An Expert System to Empower End-Users in Climate Change Action

TL;DR

EcoHomeHelper is an expert system designed to efficiently provide personalized advice on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, aiming to influence user behavior and improve information accessibility compared to traditional reading methods.

Contribution

This work introduces EcoHomeHelper, the first expert system for personalized GHG reduction advice, demonstrating its potential to change behavior and improve information retrieval.

Findings

Participants using EcoHomeHelper found advice more efficiently.

EcoHomeHelper influenced user behavior towards GHG reduction.

The system shows promise for future development and broader application.

Abstract

Climate change has been a popular topic for a number of years now. Computer Science has contributed to aiding humanity in reducing energy requirements and consequently global warming. Much of this work is through calculators which determine a user's carbon footprint. However there are no expert systems which can offer advice in an efficient and time saving way. There are many publications which do offer advice on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but to find the advice the reader seeks will involve reading a lot of irrelevant material. This work built an expert system (which we call EcoHomeHelper) and attempted to show that it is useful in changing people's behaviour with respect to their GHG emissions and that they will be able to find the information in a more efficient manner. Twelve participants were used. Seven of which used the program and five who read and attempted to find advice by reading from a list. The application itself has current implementations and the concept further developed, has applications for the future.