From Ubicomp Lab - University of Washington

Water Fixture Usage with a Single Sensor

Overview

HydroSense is a pressure-based sensor that automatically determines water usage activity and flow down to the source (e.g., dishwasher, laundry, shower) from a single non-intrusive installation point.

We are currently working on visualizations of this data to reduce water waste in the home. If you are interested in this, please email jonfroehlich@gmail.com

Lead Researchers

Jon Froehlich, Eric Larson, Shwetak Patel

Collaborators

Tim Campbell, Gabe Cohn, Elliot Saba, Eric Swanson, TienJui Lee, James Fogarty, Les Atlas

Publications

• Froehlich, J., Findlater, L., Ostergren, M., Ramanathan, S., Peterson, J., Wragg, I., Larson, E., Fu, F., Bai, M., Patel, S., Landay, J. (2012). “The Design and Evaluation of Prototype Eco-Feedback Displays for Fixture-Level Water Usage Data.” Proceedings of CHI 2012, Austin, TX, USA, May 5-10, 2012. To Appear. [Acceptance Rate: 23% (363/1577)].

• Froehlich, J., Larson, E., Saba, E., Campbell, T., Atlas, L., Fogarty, J., Patel, S (2011) A Longitudinal Study of Pressure Sensing to Infer Real-World Water Usage Events in the Home. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2011), San Francisco, California, June 12-15, 2011. [pdf]

• Larson, E., Froehlich, J., Campbell, T., Haggerty, C., Fogarty, J., and Patel, S. N. (2010). "Disaggregated Water Sensing from a Single, Pressure-based Sensor: An Extended Analysis of HydroSense using Staged Experiments" The Pervasive and Mobile Computing (PMC) Journal, In Press [website]

• Froehlich, J. E., Larson, E., Campbell, T., Haggerty, C., Fogarty, J., and Patel, S. N. 2009. HydroSense: infrastructure-mediated single-point sensing of whole-home water activity. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Orlando, Florida, USA, September 30 - October 03, 2009). Ubicomp '09. ACM, New York, NY, 235-244. Best Paper Nominee [pdf (1.33 MB)] [talk w/ videos (26.0 MB)] [talk w/o videos (18.3 MB)]

Patents

• Patel, S., Fogarty, J., Froehlich, J., Larson, E. (2009) Sensing Events Affecting Liquid Flow in a Liquid Distribution System. US Patent Pending.