SPOTLIGHT: Personal Natural Resource Consumption Profiler

The impending energy and natural resource crisis forces us to research innovative ways of optimizing our resource consumption. Recent studies have shown that a better understanding of an individual’s energy consumption helps people to lower their energy footprint significantly. We propose SPOTLIGHT, a system that profiles an individual's natural resource consumption pattern in real time using wireless sensor network technology. The current SPOTLIGHT prototype consists of power measurement, activity monitoring and energy resource management subsystems. We explore challenges and issues of each subsystem and discuss lessons we have learnt from the prototype deployment. Additionally, we will provide an outlook of extensions of SPOTLIGHT for water and gas management.