GreenSense: Developing persuasive service technology by integrating mobile devices and social interaction for sustainable and healthy behavior

Energy and carbon dioxide emissions are becoming the major issue for creating a sustainable living environment. According to ITF reports, transportation represent 23% carbon dioxide emissions globally in 2010, and has grown by 45% from 1990 to 2007. However, the lack of Information transparency of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission may become the barrier for users who are willing to perform sustainable behaviors. Moreover, the unchanged human behavior and habits are the major obstacles toward the sustainable living. In this paper, we proposed a mobile persuasive service to promote "green" sense that encourages sustainable transportation by revealing both sustainable and health information to users. The service design includes: 1) A mobile App for users to monitor their own transportation behaviors; 2) A visualization interface for users better realizing their own performance and states; 3) A virtual "Green Credit" rewards concept to create social interactions and encourage behavior change. A working prototype has been implemented and tested in a university campus. We describe the design, implementation and future work of the GreenSense project in this paper.