75% of buildings standing in the EU aren’t designed following any energy-related building code and around 45% of global final energy consumption is used in the residential sector. This is why one of Europe’s greatest energy system challenges is to active consumers at the centre of the energy system: An improvement of ICT energy efficiency (EE) solutions must go hand in hand with a change in consumer behaviour. CHROMOSOME intends to exploit these ICT EE tools by attempting to understand energy consumption in the context of individual and organisational comfort, needs, resources and motivations, as well as the social and cultural constraints that impede behaviour change and result in specific energy demands.

Therefore, the objective of CHROMOSOME is to develop a web-based platform that leads to a behavioural change on residential energy consumers towards more efficient habits and a drastic reduction on consumption/production and emissions without compromising comfort levels. This platform will be designed as a social machine, where humans and computers collaborate, that exploits energy-related data from smart meters and smart home devices and public data, as well as human interactions from social-related data. It will also be enforced by the study of a framework to support the implementation of smart contracts (blockchain) exploring new service-delivery models and engaging the consumer via incentives for the adoption of these good-practices.

By means of different pilots in social housing of Salamanca, CHROMOSOME will analyse the differences in the engagement to EE actions for different life styles. The expected changes will be underpinned by a cause-effect logic focused on several sociological strategies, with the Social Smart Home concept as leveraging vector, that will model the environment using the information gathered from Smart Home sensors and will point to the correct strategies, personalized for each user.