Towards Egocentric Fuel Efﬁciency Feedback Tiago Camacho Filipe Quintal Michelle Scott Vassilis Kostakos Ian Oakley Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI) Funchal, 9000-390, Portugal {tiago, ﬁlipe, mscott, vassilis, ian}@m-iti.org ABSTRACT Motivated by anecdotal evidence, we hypothesize that an egocentric approach is more appropriate and relevant to providing fuel eﬃciency feedback than a systemic ap- proach. In this paper we describe a proposed study to test this hypothesis, and present the design of a fuel ef- ﬁciency feedback system for public transit bus drivers. Author Keywords Feedback systems, fuel eﬃciency, public transit bus drivers ACM Classiﬁcation Keywords H5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous Introduction In 2010 the public transport authority in Madeira, Por- tugal, installed onboard electronic equipment that gau- ged driving fuel eﬃciency by presenting the driver with very simple feedback: 3 green lights progressively sug- gested that eﬃciency was increasingly optimum, while 3 red lights progressively suggested that driving eﬃ- ciency was increasingly sub-optimal. The system was intended to give drivers feedback on their driving and to help them achieve optimal driving eﬃciency. The result was negative: drivers complained to human re- sources that the system constantly showed 3 red lights, suggesting that their driving was bad. Human resources complained to operations that the system was bad for morale. In response, operations attempted to “calibrate” the system by tweaking its thresholds. The result was that the feedback became useless and largely inaccurate, ul- timately resulting in the abolishment of the system. In our discussions with the transport authority, it became clear that in addition to the misinterpretation of the feedback by the professional drivers as a rating of their driving, the mountainous terrain of Madeira caused gen- uinely ineﬃcient driving. There was simply no way to avoid steep hills that took a signiﬁcant toll on fuel con- sumption, thereby skewing the feedback towards inef- ﬁcient driving. The attempts at calibrating the sys- Copyright c  2011 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copy- ing permitted only f or private and academic purposes. This volume is pub- lished and copyrighted by the editors of PINC2011. tem failed because, eﬀectively, the on-board equipment measured pure fuel consumption which in turn was in- tricately related to the steep terrain of the environment. On the other hand, drivers perceived the feedback as a reﬂection of their skills. Our anecdotal experience with the public transport au- thority’s feedback system caused us to hypothesize that providing feedback on speciﬁc driver behaviour, as op- posed to overall fuel eﬃciency, may be a more appropri- ate way for motivating driver behaviour change. Adopt- ing a systemic approach to this issue, we argue that existing feedback mechanisms relating to eﬃciency pro- vide a view of the complete system, parts of which the driver has simply no way of eﬀecting (such as the steep terrain). Hence we argue that eﬃciency feedback fo- cusing on parts of the system that the driver can ef- fect (such as acceleration) may result in more eﬃcient driving behaviour. We term this approach to feedback egocentric. In this paper we describe a fuel eﬃciency reporting and advisory system that takes advantage of the multi- sensor and interactive nature of modern smart-phones to present feedback to drivers. More speciﬁcally, we are interested in deploying the system in public transit buses to measure its eﬀectiveness on positively inﬂuenc- ing drivers’ behavior. By continuously capturing real- time sensor data, we can calculate the Vehicle Speciﬁc Power (VSP), a surrogate variable that strongly corre- lates with both fuel consumption and pollutant emission levels, providing a systemic view of eﬃciency [11]. Cru- cially, we are able to manipulate the calculation of VSP to ignore environment variables and provide egocentric feedback. Taking advantage of this manipulation, we propose a study where we intend to test our hypothe- sis about the beneﬁts of egocentric over systemic feed- back. We believe that through the use of our system we can promote not only short-term but also medium/long- term positive changes in public transit bus drivers’ be- haviours. Related Work Research suggests that it is possible to achieve up to 15% of fuel consumption decrease when appropriate driv- ing behavior is used [2,6–8,12]. Independent of contex- tual settings, appropriate driving behavior is character- ized by a combination of two main factors: speed and