A systematic review on feedback research for residential energy behavior change through mobile and web interfaces

In the multidisciplinary research field of behavior change towards residential energy efficiency and conservation, feedback has been extensively used as a tool to increase the users' knowledge and motivation. This is evident in the ever-growing number of respective pilot implementations, aiming to test and validate different feedback techniques and strategies. However, there is still a lack of standardization and several methodological issues that usually appear in the respective studies. These result in a need for constant monitoring and systematically reviewing the field to identify trends, good practices and points of divergence and convergence. In the first part of this work, a thorough literature review is conducted on systematic reviews in the research area to extract important attributes of feedback pilots. Subsequently, an original systematic review is conducted, based on these identified attributes, aiming to shed light on the efficacy of mobile phones, tablets and computers as digital feedback mediums. The "Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic review and Meta-Analysis" (PRISMA) protocol for systematic reviews is applied throughout the respective work. The systematic review concludes that feedback through mobile phones, computers and tablets is a promising strategy for energy efficiency and conservation. However, no concrete conclusion can be extracted on the average expected effect size of this strategy. Through this process, the paper also underlines methodological issues of past research and highlights areas that remain less explored in the literature.