SAVE is a bundle of innovative services that enhance public awareness on water consumption and usage savings, promote user engagement and enhance user participation in water conservation activities.

SAVE services  include awareness services that present detailed information about water consumption and support services that leverage the power of behavioural change and persuasive strategies and features such as social proof, tailoring, self-monitoring, goal setting/commitment and rewards. The goal is to change the attitude and practices towards water conservation by enhancing public awareness on water consumption and usage savings, promoting user engagement and enhancing user participation in water conservation activities.

The SAVE services were built within the NAIADES research project.

SAVE awareness services and behavioural change support services include the following services:

  • Water consumption awareness dashboard for public employees (SAVE watering app)
  • Awareness dashboard for water management companies and public officials (SAVE City Dashboard)
  • Water consumers awareness dashboard (School dashboard)

The following figure presents the SAVE conceptual framework for water consumption awareness and behavioural change support.

SAVE watering app

SAVE watering app is a web-based application, aiming to raise awareness on flower boxes watering consumption and improving the watering processes efficiency towards water conservation and time savings for public employees.

Plants watering commonly leads to unnecessary water consumption and waste of human resources in terms of employees’ time, since all the clusters are watered a fixed number of times per week independently of the weather conditions and the plant’s humidity level.

The aim of the SAVE watering app, is to solve this issue allowing the efficient watering of the flower boxes on an as needed basis. More specifically, the app aims to nudge city workers to follow the suggested watering schedule, making them aware of the water consumption and the plants watering needs.

The application accommodates the city staff needs by providing functionalities for capturing information related to the flower boxes to be irrigated as well as by presenting watering schedules related information and consumption per watering point.

The application makes use of the SAVE AI analytics and predictive services that provide recommendations of optimal scheduling of watering activities, along with recommended watering amounts per box. In addition, SAVE watering app allows reporting problems related to watering, including broken sensors, wrong data, problems with the box and flowers destroyed.

The following diagram summarises the type of interactions for solution:

SAVE School Dashboard

SAVE School Dashboard is a web-based water awareness and behavioural change support dashboard, in order to change students’ perceptions and actions towards water conservation.

SAVE School Dashboard will be demonstrated on younger users at public schools with the support of their teachers. The dashboard allows running behavioural change support campaigns at schools, monitor them and assess their impact. It also supports different persuasive strategies including self-monitoring and feedback, social comparisons and rewards, suggestions and social norm based messages.

Water management companies & public officials need to be able to deploy ICT-supported behavioural change support programs to engage consumers in water conservation. In SAVE we focus on school students, a group of consumers that can provide a channel for generating great impact, due to its educational potential, expected higher responsiveness, longer term effect of the intervention, and the multiplier effect at social level.

The following image presents a leaderboard that shows the schools ranked based on the average water consumption per student in the last week. Also, the dashboard provides feedback and comparison based interventions in order to persuade students to make more sustainable choices.

SAVE City Dashboard

SAVE City Dashboard is a web-based water consumption awareness dashboard that supports public officials to monitor and understand how water is consumed in a specific area or consumption point.

Water management companies & public officials need water consumption awareness tools and mechanisms to better understand available consumption data. In order to cover their needs, we developed a holistic water consumption awareness dashboard that supports public officials to:

  • monitor and understand how water is consumed in a specific area or consumption point (including schools, sport facilities, gardens, other buildings) in the course of time, leveraging the available consumption metering information from smart meters or from manual readings (e.g. Aguas de Alicante’s Customer Management System includes manual readings on a monthly and quarterly basis);
  • compare consumption across various dimensions, including per groups of consumers, areas, types of consumption points and time periods. Stakeholders are able to create comparisons using filtering functionalities and become aware of the consumption across the different dimensions;
  • take decisions regarding water consumption mitigation measures based on such information and
  • monitor the impact of consumption mitigation measures after their implementation by comparing consumption pre- and post- interventions.

An online version of the Consumption Awareness Dashboard for Water Management Companies & Public officials can be accessed at the following url: http://water-awareness.imu-projects.eu/city/.