Gamified approaches for Water Management Systems: an Overview

A. Castelletti1, A. Cominola1, A. Facchini3, M. Giuliani1, P. Fraternali1, S. Herrera1, M. Melenhorst2,

I. Micheel2, J. Novak2,4, C. Pasini1, A.E. Rizzoli,3C. Rottondi3
1
Dept. Of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
2
European Institute for Participatory Media, Berlin, Germany
3
IDSIA USI/SUPSI, Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Switzerland
4
IACS-Institute for Applied Computer Science, University of Applied Sciences Stralsund, Germany

1 Introduction

Water demand is growing worldwide, especially in densely populated areas, as a consequence of population
growth [1] and urbanization [2]. The spatial concentration of water demand in urban areas is impacting de-
mand magnitude, peak intensity, share between use sectors, and indoor and outdoor usage [3]. This, coupled
with climate change and land use change, is intensifying the stress on finite water resources, creating both
operational and environmental challenges to water supply. To cope with this evolving context, traditional
supply and management schemes need to be adapted to meet future demand whilst preventing unsustainable
resources exploitation. In this context, keeping into account geographical constraints and increasing marginal
cost often limiting capacity expansion through infrastructural interventions [4], demand-side management
strategies are key to complement supply-side interventions for securing reliable water supply as well as re-
ducing shortages and overall utilities’ costs [5]. The potential of demand-side management interventions has
been demonstrated in a number of works (see, for a review, [6] and references therein), especially in the last
two decades, fostered by the promotion of several water saving programs worldwide, particularly in areas
affected by prolonged droughts (e.g., California [7]) or low-recharge periods (e.g., Australia [5]).

Within the broad portfolio of demand-side management interventions that can be implemented (i.e., techno-
logical, financial, legislative, maintenance, and educational), many recent works (e.g., [8] [9] [10] [11]) de-
voted attention to exploring the effect of behavioural change programs aiming at promoting water saving
practices and increasing water awareness among users. Detailed investigation regarding behavioural inter-
ventions has been possible especially since the late 1990s, with the development of smart water meters [12],
which enabled to monitor water consumption data with very high spatial (household) and temporal (from
several minutes up to few seconds) sampling resolution [13]. Smart meters provide essential data to charac-
terize the behavior of individual users and support the development of customized demand-side management
interventions targeted on specific groups of users, and tailored to act on the drivers of their water consump-
tion behavior. Indeed, a major role in forming the water demand is played by the behavior of water consum-
ers, each potentially driven by diverse social and individual motivations and triggers. The achievement of an
efficient water demand management depends on the aggregate effect of actions undertaken by several, di-
verse, individuals. This suggests that behavioural change programs built on customized demand-side man-
agement interventions can act on the specific drivers of users’ demand and promote water and environmental
friendly behaviors ( [14] [15]).

In this chapter, we focus on behavioural interventions and educational/awareness tools related to water issues
to gamified approaches and persuasive technologies for water management, which aim at empowering users’
knowledge and incentivize virtuous attitudes towards water conservation based on gaming mechanisms [16].
Computer and social sciences offer a wide set of gamified tools to build or raise environmental awareness in
a variety of sectors (e.g., [17] [18]; [19]) and most recently also in the water domain. According to a recent
review on serious games on environmental management [20], water management games constitute a relevant
portion of the games belonging [1] to the more general category of serious games for environmental man-
agement (more than 20% of the 25 games considered in the study and developed between 1994 and 2013).
These games represent promising tools both for learning purposes (game based learning), because they usu-
ally increase motivation and foster engagement, and for facilitating decision making processes, especially
when a number of stakeholders with conflicting interests are involved, or validating behavioural models,
such as agent-based models. Therefore, a variety of users, ranging from students and people involved in
learning processes, to professionals, local stakeholders and decision makers can potentially benefit from the
use of such tools. Yet, state-of-the-art literature often lacks exhaustive descriptions of some gamified ap-
proaches to environmental and water problems, as well as quantitative measures enabling a fair assessment
of the effectiveness of such tools for education and awareness purposes, or a comparison of different games
under common criteria [20]. Our goal is therefore to review and critically analyze the most relevant research
and industrial gamified approaches to water management, with a focus on water awareness and behavioural
change. Additionally, we present some preliminary results in terms of user response and water conservation
achievements obtained with the real-world application of a gamified approach.

The chapter is organized as follows. In the first part, we introduce some background notions on the enabling
technologies for water management systems, i.e., smart metering infrastructures, big data analytics, and per-
suasive technologies. In Section 3, we review in detail some research and commercial gamified water man-
agement applications, especially developed within EU-funded projects belonging to the ICT4Water cluster.1
Finally, in Section 4, we present the gamified platform we developed as part of the EU-funded SmartH2O
project [21], highlighting the current strengths and weaknesses identified during its application in two real
world case studies, in Switzerland and in Spain.

2 Technical concepts and methodologies

Water utilities need support tools to match water demand with supply in a sustainable way. To this aim, it is
first necessary to understand the factors than drive the demand by mining water consumption data collected
at high frequency [3]. This is now possible thanks to the development of smart metering technologies and
Internet of Things (IoT) protocols that support real time metering data collection, whereas cloud computing
and big data infrastructures allow utilities to store and process meter data, and machine learning and pattern
analysis enable the extraction of useful information such as identification of leakages and disaggregation of
end-uses.

Water utilities deal with other important issues such as providing the consumers with educational materials
on efficient water use, and designing adequate campaigns to influence their behavioral habits. Gamification
and persuasive interfaces offer a viable solution to promote behavioral change, e.g. by providing consumers
with visualization interfaces to increase their awareness on the amount of resources they use, and integrating
incentives and gamified activities aimed at influencing their behavior towards more sustainable attitudes.
Finally, water utilities have to deal with fast changing policies, extreme weather effects and other factors that
impact their revenues, therefore they require simulation tools to forecast the effects of different pricing poli-
cies and observe the expected reaction of the consumers: in this case machine learning techniques in combi-
nation with game theory can be applied to tackle the problem.
Therefore, in this section, we will provide basic notions on smart metering technologies, big data analytics
for end use disaggregation and profiling, persuasive technologies such as visualization interfaces and gamifi-
cation.

2.1 Smart metering technologies

Smart meters are electronic measurement devices installed at the users’ premises to collect detailed house-
hold consumption data and provide them to the utilities for billing and monitoring purposes. Additionally,
smart meters support bidirectional communications, thus enabling remote control and monitor of the overall
performance of the grid and helping to detect failures and leaks [22] [23]. To do so, smart metering systems
rely on a Local Area Network (LAN) to transmit individual consumption readings to a local data collector.
This transmission can occur with different frequencies (e.g. daily or hourly), according to the capabilities of
the meter and the specific usage of the collected data. The collector gathers the data and possibly operates
some preprocessing. Data is then transmitted via a Wide Area Network (WAN) to the utility for processing
and use by business applications.

22
1
http://www.ict4water.eu/
On the customer side, one of the main benefits of smart metering is that it enables real-time or close to real-
time consumption monitoring [24], which in turn raises the understanding and awareness of consumption and
possibly leads to more efficient energy usage.
Furthermore, smart metering enables utility companies to offer better customer service by allowing for on
demand readings, reductions of meter reading service costs, reductions of the response time to customer en-
quiries, more accurate billing, and reduction of the volume of non-revenue water losses thanks to a more
accurate leaks detection [25]. Finally, by processing the huge amount of collected consumption data with
statistical tools, companies are provided with a powerful tool for planning and forecasting the production and
distribution of the resources based on real-time data.

Despite the benefits of smart metering systems, there are issues related to their implementation and percep-
tion that have hindered their adoption. One of the main concerns is privacy and security of the consumption
data. Though secure design approaches have been applied to every component of the metering system, in-
cluding level access control, data validation, and error checking as well as the encryption of data, the wide-
spread usage of the utility backhaul communications and of public wireless networks has increased the expo-
sure to potential security intrusions. Utilities are not only concerned about unauthorized access to user data,
but also by potential unauthorized data manipulation to reduce billing [26].

Another issue is the meter accuracy: even though smart are very accurate and precise devices, individual
meters are still prone to hardware/software failures. Therefore, utilities need to develop monitoring strategies
and control the operational processes to identify anomalies and errors and correct them before the billing
process is executed.

Finally, the biggest challenge is the initial roll-out time scale and cost of creating the smart metering infra-
structure: the roll-out phase might take from month to years and should be managed with adequate planning
strategies to minimize costs, technical and logistic issues [26]. There are also some hidden costs for the com-
panies, e.g. the management of the infrastructure supporting the storage of big data, the acquisition or devel-
opment of tools to perform analytics, and the adaption of the currently deployed system to enable the coex-
istence with the new infrastructure [27].

2.2 Big data analytics for end use disaggregation and user profiling
In recent years, the decreasing cost of storage media and the network bandwidth increase have made data
storage and transmission relatively easy and inexpensive. This has pushed a number of companies from di-
verse business sectors to collect huge volumes of data and extract useful information to support their busi-
ness by means of “big data” mining and analysis techniques. The term “big data” refers to enormous
amounts of heterogeneous unstructured data produced at high bit-rate by a wide family of application scenar-
ios [28], e.g. social networks, data streams from sensors, and scientific and enterprise applications. In turn,
big data analytics are a set of knowledge discovery and data mining techniques adopted to uncover struc-
tures, trends, and patterns in big datasets. Such techniques are used for a wide range of applications, e.g.
medicine, scientific research, computer performance enhancement, financial market prediction, insurance,
marketing customer profiling, and resource optimization.

In the field of water management, big data and big data analytics are becoming more and more relevant since
the advent of smart metering technologies [12] in the late 1990s, which made available new residential water
consumption data at very high spatial (household) and temporal (from several minutes up to few seconds)
resolution. Such data potentially contain detailed information about the behavior of individual consumers in
terms of water consumption habits and water demand patterns, which can be employed for designing and
evaluating alternative portfolios of consumer-tailored water demand management strategies. The need for
automatic tools able to extract relevant information supporting the demand management out of large smart
metered datasets has been fostering the development of data analytics techniques and mathematical models
to accurately characterize sub-daily water consumption patterns, as well as end-use water consumption pro-
files.

As highlighted in a recent paper reviewing comprehensively several studies on high resolution residential
water demand modelling and management [6], data analysis and modelling have a key role in uncovering
water users’ behavior, especially for the purposes of the so-called (i) automatic water end-use characteriza-
tion and (ii) user modelling. More specifically, water end-use characterization consists in the disaggregation
of the total water consumption, metered at the household level, into the different end-use categories (e.g.,
shower, toilet flush, irrigation, etc.). Automatic and scalable algorithms able to perform water end-use char-
acterization are needed because the direct monitoring of end uses is not viable, as it would imply high costs
for the installation of multiple sensors, as well as scarce acceptability by water users because of its intrusive
nature. End use disaggregation is still and open research issue and several algorithms have been proposed in
the literature [29]. Most of them consists of two main phases:
 Observation phase: the actual consumption of the appliances needs to be measured (in an intrusive
way) during a given period in order to obtain reference consumption patterns of the single end uses,
typically named as “signatures”. This information is use to create the so-called “consumption base”
or “baseline” and calibrate the end-use disaggregation algorithms.
 Classification phase: In this phase, machine learning techniques, usually based on optimization and
pattern matching methods, are applied to breakdown the aggregate consumption data into single end-
use contribution, after algorithm training. The most common algorithms use in disaggregation prob-
lems are decision trees, classifiers and clustering algorithms (for more information see [6] and refer-
ences therein).

In turn, user modelling adopts data mining techniques to discover useful features in water consumption data
to model heterogeneous water demand profiles at the household level, possibly as determined by natural and
socio-psychographic factors, as well as by the users' response to different demand management interventions.
More precisely, [6] suggests that user modelling includes two categories of models, i.e., descriptive and pre-
dictive models, whose goal is characterizing the patterns and trends of observed historical water demand time
series, and forecasting future demands on the basis of natural (e.g., temperature and seasonality) and socio-
psychographic determinants (i.e., variables characterizing user demography, as well as values, attitudes, in-
terests, or lifestyles, such as age, number of house occupants, income level, conservation attitude, etc.), re-
spectively. Data-driven techniques, multivariate and correlation analysis, data dimension reduction tech-
niques (e.g. Principal Component Analysis [30]), as well as feature extraction and clustering methods are
commonly used for the above purposes.Thus, as it traditionally happened mainly for a number of marketing
purposes, the development of big data analytics techniques in the water sector is becoming fundamental to
help understanding and characterizing the behavior of heterogeneous consumer, ultimately supporting the
implementation of tailored demand management strategies and customized feedbacks supporting water con-
servation and management programs.

2.3 Persuasive technologies

Persuasive technologies attempt to change the user’s attitudes or behaviors without coercion or deception
[31] and find applications in visualization interfaces, video games, mobile devices and social media. We can
find examples of persuasive technologies in online retail websites, health care, education, resource manage-
ment, and collaboration tools. Persuasive applications aim at integrating within the habits of the user, and
operate in a loop consisting of triggers, i.e., stimuli that alert the user and draw her attention, actions, which
are the response of the user to a trigger, and variable rewards, which acknowledge the user’s action in a way
that surprises and stirs the desire to repeat the experience.

Using persuasive technologies provides some advantages over traditional media, or human persuaders. The
most important is ubiquity: thanks to the proliferation of mobile and wearable devices, smart meters and
home-devices interconnected by means of IoT technologies, people can be targeted at any place and at any
time. The diversity of modalities is another important advantage: computers and electronic devices can de-
liver messages in a huge variety of modalities including text, audio, video, graphs, animations with a higher
persuasion impact. Finally, computers can store and access huge amounts of information that enable them to
present new facts, statistics and references as no other media can.

2.3.1 Visualization Interfaces

Visualization has recently become a popular topic in computer science: it is formally defined as the use of
computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition [32]. In other
words, the visualization of information deals with the design and aesthetic aspects of computer interfaces to
represent complex abstract data in a clear and comprehensible way, in order to enable users to analyze them
with visual tools. Data visualization leverages technical backgrounds like information retrieval and data min-
ing, computer graphics, and human-computer interaction.

Other interesting features of information visualization are the persuasion capabilities that it can have on user:
it has been shown [33] [34] that a visual representation of some data can influence personal opinions about a
topic by making people able to interpret the data, thus receiving feedbacks that showed them that their initial
beliefs were wrong. Although ethical implications about the misuse of visualization to deceive or manipulate
are currently under discussion, the persuasive capabilities of visualization can be positively used to influence
users’ behaviors.

2.3.2 Gamification
The concept of gamification has become increasingly popular in research and commercial applications.
Gamification is defined as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts [35]. Some other terms
like “serious games” and “games with a purpose” have also recently emerged. Although the two share many
characteristics with gamification, they are fundamentally different: serious games are full functional games
with a specific purpose like the education of a subject or the training on a skill, whereas gamified applica-
tions are enhancements of existing systems, services, tasks or processes, which incorporate game-based
mechanisms but do not necessarily require them to function or be performed [36].

The main goals of gamification are the engagement of users and the enhancement of their experience, with
the aim of increasing users’ participation in the operations or social interaction aspects, or of raising users’
productivity [37]. Gamification can also be used to set goals for the users in different contexts (e.g. teaching
new skills): challenging users to meet an established requirement is known to be an effective motivational
strategy [38].

In order to design a gamified application, it is important to characterize the people for which the game is
intended and understand their motivations to play games. Bartle [39] proposed a player taxonomy based on
the user motivations and interactions with the game and other players, which consists of four categories:
 Achievers: they are competitive and enjoy beating difficult challenges whether they are set by the
game or by themselves. The more challenging the goal, the most rewarded they tend to feel. Most
children like to see progress in terms of points, clearing a level or a similar sense of progression.
 Explorers: they like to explore the world, not just its geography but also the finer details of the game
mechanics. They try to learn all the mechanics, short-cuts, tricks, and glitches that there are to know
in the game, and they are more likely to play a game several time in order to do that.
 Socializers: they are often more interested in having relations with the other players than playing the
game itself. The game is merely a tool they use to meet others in-game or outside of it or hang out
with their friends.
 Killers: They are driven by competition with other people and prefer them over artificial intelligence
controlled by the computer.

Figure 1 shows Bartle’s players’ taxonomy: the horizontal axis represents the preference of the user to inter-
act with other players or the environment, the vertical axis emphasizes the preference of the user to act or
interact with or on something.
 Figure 1: Bartle’s player taxonomy [40].

Based on the target type of player, the gamification designer can think about how to design the game mecha-
nisms in order to engage the players. For example, when targeting an explorer the designer has to think about
the size of the world and the diversity of geographies and interactions. Differently, if the target is the group
of socializers, the focus should be on personalization features of the game and on the communication and
cooperation systems.

There are four necessary elements to design a game. The first is the game mechanism that defines the proce-
dures and rules of the game: the mechanics of a game describe the goal of the game, how to achieve it, and
what happens when players do; choosing the mechanic defines the gameplay. There are several mechanisms
that are widely used for gamifying everyday tasks [16]:
 Achievements and Badges: they are typically awarded if the player reaches a certain level oar mount
of points in the game. They may require the user to perform tasks several times, master a skill or ex-
plore the environment.
 Progress Bar: it indicates how close a user has come towards the achievement given goal. When the
player completes a task or an activity, the progress bar is filled to indicate the progress of getting
closer to a goal. How much the progress bar is moved is often determined by the severity of a task or
by using points. The progress bar may often be combined with experience points, where the experi-
ence points collected determines the movement of the progress bar.
 Experience Points: Experience points are an indicator of how much experience the player has gained
within a game or setting. These points may be awarded by completing tasks, exploring areas and fea-
tures or other similar activities. Experience points are usually combined with a leveling system, for
example reaching certain amounts unlocks new levels, new rewards or new features. Experience
points are also often combined with leaderboards.
 Leaderboards: they consist in lists of the players ordered by their collected points, completed activi-
ties or any other predefined metric. Each user has a score defined by rules set before a competition
started, this score is compared to the one of the other players and players are ranked based on the
scores. Leaderboards may be fully dynamic or state-based (i.e., a new order is recalculated after a
certain period of time).
 Contests: they are categorized in duel-like head-to-head contests or free-for-all contests with no limit
on the capacity of players. A duel-like contest may be a knockout style of competition where players
compete to get the highest amount of points within a given time period or a similar type of a goal. In
a free-for-all contest, the winner is whoever fulfills a specific goal to the best degree. The goal which
players try to achieve is set be a specific set of rules determined before the start of the contest.
 Real-world Rewards: used together with leaderboards and contest, real-world awards may be given
to some of the best players of the game. Usually the rewards are related with the topic of the applica-
tion.
 Social networking: it provides to the users a common platform where they can share their achieve-
ment and recent activities, since users typically experience a sense of reward when their publications
 receive comments. It is possible to link the game to existing social networks like Facebook or twit-
ter, or create specialize forums like Steam does in its platform.

The second element is the story, i.e. the sequences of events that happen during the game and the events that
occurred prior to the start of the game. It could be a liner story or it can change depending on the user ac-
tions, therefore is linked to the game mechanics that should enable the storytelling.

The third element is the aesthetics, i.e. how the game should look like, the music and sound that go along
with the story telling and the mechanics, aesthetic aspects constitute the most direct relationship with the user
experience and influence engagement and immersion.

Finally, the fourth element that links them all together is the supporting technology: “it is essentially the me-
dium in which the aesthetics take place, in which the mechanics will occur, and through which the story will
be told.” [16]. Choosing one technology enables you to do certain things but might make very difficult to
perform some others, choosing it right is a complex topic.

3 An overview on gamified water management systems

We now overview the most relevant ongoing projects and applications aimed at the design and implementa-
tion of Water Management Systems and gamified applications in the context of resource efficiency and con-
sumption awareness enhancement. Our aim is the identification of the key features and functionalities that
such systems should offer to be adopted by water utility companies, as well as the design challenges and
implementation approaches that are common to gamified applications.

3.1 Urban Water Project

Urban Water [41] is a project funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program for research and
technological development, and it was developed by 12 partners from 8 different countries, among them
there were three water utilities, one university, one video game development company and some governmen-
tal institutions.
The project was seeking to develop and test an intelligent water management platform for the efficient and
integrated management of water resources in urban areas [42]. More in detail, the project aim was a 50%
reduction of urban water waste over 5 years of operation. The platform provides tools to manage data com-
ing from smart meters, process information to forecast water demand and water supply availability, detect
leakages in the water supply network, support decision-making of water authorities and water distributors,
and empower customers to reduce their water consumption.
The project objectives also included a market analysis at European level to identify market and legal Europe-
an requirements and new market opportunities to ensure commercialization of the platform; the development
of a new multi-technology communication gateway prototype combining wired and wireless technology,
ensuring maximum geographic coverage and privacy; and the deployment of robust and proven data man-
agement tools based on Azure cloud platform guaranteeing efficient data management and customer confi-
dentiality.
The project identified 7 enabling features to increase efficiency in water usage [43]:
 Effectively estimate water demand in urban areas in order to efficiently manage water supply chains.
 Reduce waste of water and economic losses associated to leakages in the urban water distribution
network.
 Smooth daily water demand daily peaks in order to allow distributors to save costs related to the
management of urban water distribution networks.
 Guarantee efficient and secure computational data management on the basis of smart grids’ recent
and upcoming deployments in Europe.
 Reduce operating and maintenance costs associated with water metering and billing in urban areas.
 Incentivize urban households to reduce their current consumption and soften the current European
water demand peaks.
 Build effective partnerships and develop innovation synergies between equipment providers, ICT
companies and water distributors.
The platform consist on several components [44], the main one is the customer portal that offers consump-
tion monitoring, consumption forecast, and billing access information. Besides this functionalities, the portal
features a serious game “Water Mansion”.
For the utility management, the platform provides a business dashboard ( Figure 2) that shows the consump-
tion (real and forecasted), the billing per hour and the notification of recent events; it provides access to other
functionalities such as:
 the decision supporting tool that provide visual information about the water availability and demand
predictions;
 the leakage detection system that allows night flow analysis and mass balance;
 hydraulic model building tools;
 the demand influence tools that include the automatic and dynamic billing address, the dynamic con-
sumption analysis and the configuration options of the Water Mansion game;
 the integration tools that include the notification and alerts and management and monitoring.
The featured online serious game, Water Mansion [45], seeks to raise consumers’ awareness about efficient
water consumption and its relation with economic savings. In the game users should execute a series of task
involving day-by-day actions, such as washing their hands, cleaning the dishes or filling the swimming pool.
Each of this actions increases the consumption and reduces the “gold” that the user owns. The objective is to
learn how to reduce consumption in order to save more “gold”. The users are awarded a certain amount of
“green drops” if in a period of time the consumption is reduced with respect to previous periods (Figure 3).

Figure 2: Urban Water Dashboard [44].

Figure 3: Water Mansion, on the top left: the green drop and gold scores; on the center: the action tags [45].
 3.2 WatERP project
WatERP [46] is another project funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program. It was devel-
oped and supported by the Staffordshire University, the technological center of Catalonia and other 7 techno-
logical and governmental partners.
The project was focused on developing an “Open Management Platform” supported by real-time knowledge
on the water supply and demand that enables an integrated and customized monitoring of the entire water
supply distribution system, with the purpose of reducing the gap between water supply and demand through
this information interaction and processing.
The project had two main objectives: an 8% water consumption reduction in water-scarce areas where water
distribution is already efficient, and a 5% energy usage reduction in areas where the water is abundant and
the distribution is efficient but the consumption of energy is high. Additional goals were the increase of user
awareness and the promotion of behavioral changes of water utilities and authorities, (not end-consumers).
From the technological point of view, the project aimed at identifying the key variables that must be moni-
tored throughout the water supply distribution system to enable water supply and demand to be matched
across the entire water supply network and while coping with water scarcity, drought and vulnerability indi-
cators; and at developing protocols for real-time data collection and storage ensuring data quality, reliability
and consistency.
The WatERP architecture consists of three main components:
 the data warehouse, which manages the processing and storing of consistent, continuous and usable
water supply and usage data originating from heterogeneous sources (periodically or in real-time);
 the Decision Support System (DSS), which coordinates actions prioritizing water usage, improving
distribution efficiency and reducing costs;
 the Demand Management System (DMS), which analyzes socio-economical drivers and policies to
improve the management of water demand.
Information from the whole supply chain (including e.g. water sources and deposits, desalinization plants,
distribution networks) are stored in the data warehouse, which makes it available to the users in real-time
(with the possibility of personalizing data analytics) in order to support their decision making, policy making
and water pricing, risk management and planning processes [47].
Demand forecasting is performed by leveraging advanced data analytics that calculate similarity indexes
between the consumption pattern of the current day and historical consumption data available in the data-
base, identify the most similar ones, calculate weights to be assigned to similar days, and finally output a
prediction of the demand for the desired future date.

3.3 Waternomics
Waternomics [48] is an ongoing project developed collaboratively by 10 institutions, including the national
university of Ireland Galway, the UNESCO-Institute for Water Education, and the municipality of Thermi, in
Greece.
The goal of the project is to provide personalized and actionable information about water consumption and
water availability to individual households, companies and cities in an intuitive and effective manner, at a
time-scale relevant for decision making. Access to this information will increase end-user awareness and
improve the quality of the decisions for decision makers in companies and in governments [49].
The project aims to accomplish these objectives by combining water usage-related information from various
sources and domains to offer water information services to end-users, supporting personalized interaction
with water information services, conducting knowledge transfer from energy management systems to water
management systems, enabling sharing of water information services across communities of users, and ena-
bling open business models and flexible pricing mechanisms responsive to both demand and cli-
mate/environmental conditions.
Additional project goals are the introduction of Water footprints (i.e., demand response and accountability)
in the water sector; the interactive engagement of the consumers to enable efficient water consumption and
behavioral change; the enactment of ICT-enabled water management by providing relevant tools and meth-
odologies for water-related issues to corporate decision makers and municipal area managers.
The Waternomics platform consists of a four-layered architecture:
 the hardware layer includes by the smart meters installed at different levels of the water distribution
network, depending on the location site, (e.g. at appliance level for households and at building level
public buildings or offices).
  The data layer stores, processes and analyzes the collected metering data to provide high level in-
formation reports (destined e.g. to municipalities).
 The support service layer implements the data analytics, the monitoring and alerting systems, and
responds to the information requests from the application layer [50].
 The application layer is designed as an application portal: it provides basic functionalities (or appli-
cations) and can be extended by getting more applications from a marketplace. Users access the
marketplace, select the application they are interested in based on their role and the activities they
want to perform, and install it. This approach ensures great flexibility in terms of personalization
[51] and makes the portal customizable for a wide range of user types and location sites: administra-
tors can decide which application should be available for each role and existing applications can be
enhanced by adding components. Third party applications can also be made available through an
API [51].
The applications are divided in 4 categories:
 Monitoring: Applications that allow users to monitor their consumption and have it visualized.
 Learning: Applications that provide educational and informative material to users.
 Exploring: Applications that allow users to explore the potentials of the dataspace in terms of analyt-
ics and related services.
 Playing: Gaming applications or applications with gamification elements that help users to learn and
educate themselves through playing or through interacting with each other in non-leisure contexts.
The platform provides also a set of independent components, also available through the marketplace, which
enable the user to create custom applications by combining them (e.g. to create dashboards).
Some of the base applications for the household users are:
 Family Dashboard: Every family is entitled to create its own dashboard using a set of available
components and choosing those that fit their needs. The total consumption component provides a
visualization through a graph bar, the documentation explains that showing only cubic meters meas-
urement might not be representative for most of the users, so it provides alternative representations
like the number of kilograms of apples that could be produced with the same amount of water, or the
amount of CO2 that was released in the environment to deliver that amount of water to the house-
hold, thus enhancing awareness of the family water consumption (Figure 4).
 Consumption timeline: This component emulates the function of a social media timeline by present-
ing series of events in a chronological order. The points along the timeline represent disaggregate
consumption events and provide comparison with previous week’s events of the same type (e.g.,
washing-machine water consumption).
 Notifications: the user can set notifications preferences for each type if events, and receive alerts ac-
cordingly. For example, the users can set an alert when the total consumption of the month is 10%
higher than the one of the previous month.
 Drought conditions monitor: This application periodically receives data from the European Drought
Observatory [EDO] and informs the users about drought periods, thus raising awareness of water
scarcity.
For the administration side, the offered applications are:
 Management Dashboard: Managers are interested not only in monitoring the total consumption but
also in controlling specific areas of the network. In the case of public buildings (e.g. an airport), it al-
lows for monitoring specific building areas (e.g. the consumption of one of the terminals), as long as
the metering infrastructure supports the collection of disaggregated data.
 Technician Dashboard: it provides overall information and notifications about critical detected
events to support a timely on-field intervention from staff members.
 Leak Detection: the platform monitors the network and when a leakage is detected by the deployed
sensors, the notification system sends alarms. Leakages can also be monitored through a graphical
interface.
 Fault detection diagnostics: This application uses the baseline consumption and a series of rules to
detect anomalies on the network flow, generating alerts about events that require validation or inter-
vention.
 Figure 4. Family Dashboard [51].

For what concerns the game framework, the Waternomics platform [51] provides a leaderboard that shows
the highest scores achieved by the users in the different game applications. The platform offers two games of
trivia-like fashion. The first one is “Water Flavors”: it asks the player to make educate guesses about how
much water is necessary to produce certain products. In case of correct guess, the player is awarded with
points. This way, the game aims at creating awareness by educating the player about the importance of water
in the production of food and other products of common use. The information used in the game is retrieved
from the Water Footprint Organization [52].
The second game is called “Water saving calculator” (Figure 5): in the first stage it provides a collection of
water saving tips, in a second phase the player is asked to answer a set of questions by performing calcula-
tion based on the information provided by the tips. Players get points for the right answers and extra infor-
mation for the wrong ones. The objective of the game is to make the players aware of the amount of water
they are consuming and the potential savings that they can reach by changing some behaviors. As mention
before, the architecture allows for the inclusion of additional games and gamified applications: the point
storage and leaderboard management is achieved by an API.
 Figure 5: Water Savings Calculator [51].

3.4 SmartH2O
The SmartH2O project [53] is funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program for Research
and Innovation. The project aims at creating a communication channel and a continuous feedback-loop be-
tween water users and utility companies, providing consumers with information on their consumption in near
real-time while enabling water utilities to plan and implement strategies to reduce or reallocate water con-
sumption. This can be achieved by exploiting collected information about how the consumers adapt their
behavior as a reaction to different stimuli, such as awareness campaigns and changes in regulations or prices.
To this aim, smart water meters are leveraged for collecting high frequency consumption data, which are
used to provide high granularity information to water utilities on the state of the distribution network. At the
same time, the collected information can be employed to stimulate a change in water consumption behavior.
Accordingly, the SmartH2O system has been designed as a behavioural change support system (BCSS): “a
socio-technical information system [...] designed to form, alter or reinforce attitudes, behaviours or an act of
complying without using coercion or deception” [54]. The SmartH2O approach considers that a change in
water consumption behaviour can occur when underlying psychological determinants change through a
combination of different incentive and persuasion strategies, acknowledging that both in the energy domain
and in the water domain consumption data alone are not sufficient to induce a sustainable behavioural
change ( [15] [55]). Rather than relying on smart metered consumption feedback alone, the systematic ap-
proach followed by SmartH2O is grounded in motivational theory and research on incentive models, em-
ploying different mechanisms to incentivize users to save water. This has resulted in an ICT platform for
improving consumer awareness, available on web and on mobile devices via a downloadable app. It incorpo-
rates smart metering, social computation, data visualization, big data analytics to model user behavior, and
gamification to engage consumers in the process.

As inducing long term behavioral changes is a difficult task that involves psychological, social and cultural
factors, the project incorporates a mix of multiple engagement strategies. All actions undertaken by the con-
sumer, in all the different applications (web portal, mobile app and even an educational game) are logged.
Based on such action logs and on the metered consumption data, a gamified social game is performed in
which consumers are encouraged to save water through a mechanism that assigns points, badges and prizes
based on the full spectrum of their actions; leaderboards and weekly/monthly competitions provide a social
dimension to the game and increase engagement and motivation to participate by creating a sense of com-
munity. Moreover, through the game the users are encouraged to provide detailed profile information about
their demographics and their household configuration: such data are greatly valued by utility companies, as
their analysis can provide important insights on the factors that drive the demand trends.
Figure 6 shows the home page of the Consumer Porta developed in SmartH2O. The page displays the histo-
gram of the consumption readings collected with the smart meter infrastructure.

Figure 6: Home Page of the SmartH2O Consumer Portal

To improve the awareness of the impact of consumption and start engaging the user in a proactive water sav-
ing behavior, a complementary interface visualizes consumption data in an alternative way, shown in Figure
7.

Figure 7: interface of the SmartH2O Consumer Portal showing an overview of the consumption progress
In the overview visualization, the progress of the consumption in a certain period, e.g., the current week, is
displayed as a tank filling with water. The tank metaphor is the basis for further incentive model elements, as
discussed in more detail in Section 4.

As a complement to the utilitarian interfaces provided by the consumer web portal and mobile app,
SmartH2O has also designed a water board game, called Drop! (show in Figure 8), with a digital extension,
called Drop!TheQuestion.

Figure 8: the Drop! board game and its digital extension (left); scanning a card with Drop!TheQuestion (right)

The Drop! board game is assigned as a reward to the users of the consumer web portal that achieve a mini-
mum level of activity. It exploits a very popular home and family-oriented entertainment scheme, called
“push your luck”. In this class of games, the players repeat an action (e.g., drawing a card) until they decide
to stop, due to an increased risk of losing points or the next turn (e.g., drawing a negative card). The Drop!
board game is designed around the basic idea that a game does not need to be educational, to be... education-
al. The game metaphor is simple yet engaging: Lily is a young and clever girl who wants to save water.
Lily’s friend is a monster who does things in exactly the opposite way: the monster spills water ( Figure 8).
During the game, players do not need to answer questions or prove their knowledge to win, as is winning is
determined by luck. The cards showing Lily are good cards and let the player score positive points, while the
monster cards give players negative points. At the end of the game, players can transform the monster cards
with negative points into positive points, by scanning a QR code on each monster card and answering a ques-
tion received through their mobile phone or tablet (as shown in the right part of Figure 8). By playing the
game within a household, saving water becomes a topic of conversation. This stimulates a water saving cul-
ture within the household, which in turn is a strong predictor of water consumption [56]. Playing the board
game, and answering questions in the mobile app game increases knowledge. Users are incentivized to play
the game in two distinct but related ways: the game design of the Drop! game itself, and the link with the
gamified portal. Answering questions in the mobile game is awarded with points on the consumer portal.

The SmartH2O application is currently deployed in two real world scenarios: the first in Switzerland, the
second in Spain. A more detailed description of the SmartH2O application and the case studies will be pro-
vided in Section 4.
 3.5 A brief review of some commercial products
With the growing concern for water scarcity and governments of developed countries starting to change their
regulations and policies about water management, the market offers important business opportunities for big
technology companies that have already started to work on resource management projects. In the following,
we focus on two commercial platforms, respectively offered by IBM and Oracle.
IBM Intelligent Water [57] is part of the smart cities portfolio of the company: the platform offers situational
awareness of operations at several levels and a range of advances tools. It does not necessarily replace the
legacy systems of the utilities, but works on top of those by providing visualizations and data analytics, rais-
ing alerts, starting workflows to respond to a given situation, and displaying information on dashboards that
can be configured based on the user role and access level (Figure 9).
Operational data are holistically leveraged to improve water management: the framework includes a water
analytic component which aimed at reducing the non-revenue water through pressure optimization and pipe
failure prediction; a monitoring component for smart meters to detect fraud; analytics components to im-
prove irrigation, flood management and sewer overflows prevention.
The framework has been successfully deployed in three study cases. The first is located in China, where the
platform was used to manage the operation of a hydropower plant in collaboration with SimuTech solutions
[58]. The platform supported the whole management cycle, from the planning phase of the hydropower oper-
ations to the monitoring of the state of the reservoirs and of energy production.
A second study case is in Netherlands, where the national Ministry of Water adopts the platform to counter-
act the effects of extreme weather conditions, predict floods and droughts, and monitor the quality of drink-
ing water, by exploiting its capabilities of proactively proposing preventive actions to possible issues.
Finally, the last study case is in Miami Dale County, where the tool is mainly used to monitor and detect
leaks: using geospatial maps, the operators get alerted about potential problems that can be visualized
through dashboards displaying various analytics.

Figure 9: IBM Intelligent Water Dashboard, household level [Intelligent Water].

Oracle Utilities [59] offers a full suite of solutions for utilities, covering all aspects of management and plan-
ning. The suite is fully configurable to enable the utilities to adapt quickly to the changing regulations and
ensures the full integration with legacy systems of the utilities.
Some of the most interesting resource management applications of the suite are:
 the metered data management component, which deals with consumption data validation for con-
sistency and storage;
 the smart grid gateway, which operates as a data hub to ensure two way communication between the
smart meters and the utility enterprise applications;
 the operational device management component, which provides asset management of the smart grid
and meters and allows for real time configuration, automatic inventory, technical maintenance and
security verification;
 the data raker, which provides advance data analytics, data visualization and enrichment including
meter malfunction detection, customer tampering detection, establishment of maintenance priorities
and billing exceptions detection;
  the smart water network component, which provides automated valve operations management, leak-
age detection, outage isolation, shutdown management, and geo-spatial visualization for segment
isolation.
Another group of applications of the suite supports mission-critical utility operations and include visualiza-
tion applications that allows to access, view, digitally annotate and collaborate on assets information and
case-related documents (schematics, blueprints, 3D models, etc.). They also provide pre-built dashboards,
extractors and schemas for the information of the other products.
Finally, a set of complementary applications is designed for customer and billing support and dedicated to
utilities serving residential, commercial, and industrial customers, with functions for managing payment and
credit collection:
 The customer relationship management component support sales and marketing by segmenting the
users in groups with similar characteristics and providing insight of the group’s specific needs, be-
sides handling customer order management.
 The rate management component handles pricing design and analysis, using analytics it evaluates
the implications of the changes in prices offer to clients.

3.6 Gamified Applications for resource efficiency

Despite some successful studies, changing user’s behavior via software is not an easy task. This is due to
fundamental questions such as how to design an effective application to achieve the desired results and how
to maintain behavioral changes in the long-term. As an example, the response-relax effect is often observed:
after the change induced by the initial exposure to the persuasive technology, the attention paid to the feed-
back reduces and users revert to their previous behaviors [60].
Computer games have recently been advocated as a promising tool for computer-mediated behavioral
change. They create an immersive environment that can attract also kids and teenagers to serious topics and
manifest a high persuasive potential. Moreover, games effectively exploit the procedural representation ap-
proach, i.e., a form of symbolic expression that uses processes rather than language to convey ‘how things
work’ [61]. In well-designed games, players can combine the processes embodied in the game and create
new interactions beyond those considered by the game designers. This paradigm introduces new ways to
persuade the player, which match well with the rhetoric concepts exposed by Fogg in [62] (triggers, motiva-
tion and ability) as the traditional means for persuasion through technology. Some recent contributions in
environment and sustainability games focus on power conservation, environmental awareness, fossil energy
use and water: Table 10-Table 11 compare some persuasive games specific for water management along their
main distinctive features:
 Mechanics describes the type of the game.
 Roles list the roles assumed by the players.
 Players define the number of players that engage in a game round.
 Feedback specifies whether the game can interact with players during a round.
 Issues summarize the main problems highlighted by the game.
 Focus refers to the core persuasive/educational objective of the game.
 Target identifies a specific population of players targeted by the game.
 Data collection
 Platform specifies the technological environment/device for which the game is designed.
 Technology characterizes the implementation languages and frameworks.

Table 10: Summary of water games features. Games analyzed: Water wars [63], Atoll Game [64], Catchment Detox
[65], FloodSim [66] and Aqua Republica [67].
Water Wars Atoll Game The Basin Chal- FloodSim Aqua Republica
lenge/ Catchment
detox
Mechanics Turn based Rpg computer assist- Turn based Turn based Turn based
ed
Roles Stakeholders Family Policymakers Flood policy strate- Mayor
gist
Feedback Message N/A Messages in game Messages in game Messages in game
and leaderboard
Issues Policies, variable Policies, variable Policies, variable floods Policies, variable
weather conditions weather conditions, weather conditions, weather conditions
scarcity scarcity
Players Multiplayer with chat Up to 16 presential 1-2 players 1 player 1 player
players
Focus Interaction among Land/water alloca- Manage a river Raising awareness on Conflicts and trade-
inhabitants tion conflicts catchment flooding policies offs in a river basin
Target New Mexico resi- Tarawa atoll resi- Teenage students UK residents Everyone
dents dents and policy
makers
Data collection Interviews Semi-automatic N/A NA/ Numerical models
software (Mike Basin)
Platform Web and mobile PC supported board Web Web Web (portable)
game
Technology N/A VisualWorks and Flash Flash Unity
CORMAS platform

Table 11: Summary of water games features. Games analyzed (Irrigania, Run the River, [74], SeGWADE, Drop-
TheQuestion!).
Irrigania [73] Run the river2 [74] SeGWADE [75] Drop The Question
[]
Technology VisualBasic N/A Mixed (option card HTML5 and WebGL Java
ASP.NET selection and model
simulation)
Roles Farmer Decision maker Decision makers Water Distribution Water expert
Systems managers
Feedback No feedback In game alerts Model-derived Continuous and No feedback
feedback instant feedback to
players
Mechanics turn-based strategy Simulation Model simulation Model simulation Trivia
game
Issues Governance and Balancing water use River management Water Distribution General water culture
management of between various Systems design
common resources water consumers decisions
Players Single player Single player Teams Single player
Focus Water sharing poli- Water management Water management Drinking Water Interesting facts on
cies, water scarcity policies policies under multi- Distribution Systems water and water
ple perspectives consumption
Target Students Kids Students, researchers. Students Family
and professionals
Platform Web Mobile phones and N/A Windows, Linux, Android mobile
tablets iOS and Android devices
Data collection Discussion in class Based on actual and Water system mod- Feedback computed N/A
modelled historic elled with Integrated with hydraulic simu-
data Assessment lation engine based
Meta Model (IAMM) on EPANET

In summary, findings from existing literature suggest that gamification strategies and games with a purpose
can be applied in resource efficiency context with a good user acceptance and successful results in savings
(as supported by empirical studies such as [68]). However, the success depends on many factors, most of
them related with the design of the incentive models and game mechanics motivating the usage of the sys-
tems and the specific system functionalities offered.
The most important points and lessons from the literature include:
 Providing real time and historical information of the consumption is important, but the data is use-
less if the consumer cannot associate meaning to it, therefore informative measurement should go
along with the real data (e.g. presenting cost in terms of money along with the consumption in cubic
meters).
 Real word rewards and prizes are a good strategy to keep user engagement, but it is important to se-
lect them according to the type of consumers. Having various prizes with different options seems to
be a good solution when the player population is diverse.
 Games are good influencers when trying to make changes in consumer behaviors, but permanent
changes are difficult to achieve. The game mechanics have to be powerful enough to keep the user
mind set, a good recommendation is to strongly relate the actions and points in the game with actions
in the real world.

1717
2
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mdba.runtheriver
  People are now aware of the problems related with resources and are willing to change their behav-
ior, but constant, useful and interesting information about what to change and how to change it
should be always available on demand and offered by the game.
 Designing systems that can successfully stimulate behavioural change requires a systematic model-
ling of the behavioural change process and its implementation through different types of incentives
(virtual, physical, social) adapted to the characteristics of specific target user groups [69].
 Social interaction and competition are powerful engagers and influencers of behavior, they should be
exploited but in some cases moderation might be required and evaluation should be made about the
effort required in relation with the benefits.
Further discussion and examples of serious games for the water management field can be found in [75].

4 Some experiences from the design and deployment of the SmartH2O system

In this section we consider some of the main experiences from the design and deployment of the SmartH2O
gamified system for behavioural change. In particular, we show how design guidelines for gamified con-
sumption visualisations have informed the design of the SmartH2O system, suggesting their suitability to
guide the design of such classes of applications. We also summarize some of the first evaluation results,
with respect to user feedback, system acceptance and participation dynamics, as well as first encouraging
results of observed reduction in water consumption in a small scale pilot.

4.1 Design guidelines for visualisation and gamificationn in water saving applications

Beyond leaning on findings from motivational and psychological theory in the design of the incentive model,
the design of the SmartH2O system described in Section 3.1.4 also paid particular attention to effective use
of visualisation and its integration with gamification elements for supporting behavioural change. Based on
the literature review of consumption visualization and use of gamified elements for water and energy conser-
vation (as structurally similar domains [70]), initial guidelines were formulated and supplemented with find-
ings from the SmartH2O requirements analysis workshops to yield a set of design guidelines for water and
energy saving applications (see Table x).

Table 12: Design guidelines for water and energy saving applications (Micheel et al., 2015, p. 557f.)
DG Refined aspects from SmartH2O design cycle & user workshops
a Present interactive layered visualization (simplest by default) c Goals should be related to concrete actions users can perform
Use visual metaphors relating to user’s consumption context d Feedback on consumption should be action-oriented and include
saving tips embedded in the visualization
b Present separate views for less vs. highly data-affine users e Real rewards should engage even more pragmatic users
Overview of consumption should trigger awareness, and Separate views for pragmatic & hedonic users should be con-
detailed information should point out concrete actions sidered
Units & analogies should illustrate consumption & savings f Common goals have the potential to bring e.g. neighbors closer
Showing consumption rather than smaller savings can raise Both are promising for different users embedded in the relevant
awareness social context: in-group collaboration, intra-group competition

Accordingly, the SmartH2O system incorporated different types of visualization linked with gamified ele-
ments (such as saving goals) described in Section 3.1.4. Most clearly, the application of the guidelines is
reflected in the design of metaphor-based overview visualisation. In a first version it employed a speedome-
ter metaphor, that showed daily and monthly consumption in comparison to one’s average (Figure 13a), while
in a second version, this was replaced with a water pipe metaphor ( Figure 13b) to support more immediate
cognitive mapping to the water topic and reinforce water awareness. The pipe metaphor formed the basis for
integrating goal setting and gamified elements with the consumption visualisation, as can be seen from the
yellow box in Figure 13b (e.g. setting self-set goals and receiving double points when reaching them, visual
alerts about current consumption with respect to set goals, using swiming pool analogy to illustrate the mean-
ing of the amount of saved water etc.). Similarly, while the bar chart overview visualisation (see Figure 13)
supported more pragmatically oriented users and needs, the water pipe visualisation supported also hedonic
aspects. Displaying the own consumption average and the average of the neighbourhood in the bar chart
view all (Figure 13) supported social comparison. Linking achieved points to different type of collectable real
rewards, addressed more pragmatic users for whom social comparison or symbolic awards (such as badges)
weren’t enough to motivate action.

a) b)

Figure 13: Metaphoric visualisations: a) speedometer-based display, b) water pipe metaphor

4.2 Evaluating user responses and first effects on water consumption

The results of preliminary evaluation of the SmartH2O system in the first pilot in the municipality of Tegna
(Switzerland), although reflecting a small initial test base confirmed the suitability of such a design, suggest-
ing that the identified design guidelines are suitable for informing the design of such systems. There, the
system has been deployed in two versions: as a basic portal implementing only the “pragmatic” elements,
such as the interactive water consumption visualisation and the water saving tips, and the gamified portal
adding goal setting and the full spectrum of gamified incentives and rewards. After a 4 months of basic por-
tal trial with 40 users (households) user feedback collected with an online questionnaire (n= 15 / 37,5% re-
sponse rate) revealed that most users found that the system made water conservation more interesting (11/15
users) with half of them finding it fun to use (7/15), indicating that even a non-gamified system incentivizes
use (for more details see [69]). In particular, most respondents found the interactive water consumption chart
easy to use (9 / 15 users) and almost all respondents (14 / 15 users) agreed that from the chart and the over-
view visualisations they could understand how much water their household consumed over time [69]. The
perceived usefulness of the main design elements (the water consumption chart (8 / 15 users), consumption
overview (7 / 15 users) and water saving tips (9 / 15 users)) was also relatively positively rated, and for all
these three features most users also stated that they made them think about water conservation more often
(11/15 users). Even though tentative in nature, and only based on a first simple version of the visualisations
(bar chart view and speedometer metaphor), the results suggest that the designed visualisations were capable
of incentivizing users to reflect on their consumption.
Following this initial assessment of user acceptance (based on the model by [71]) the evaluation of the gami-
fied portal through the analysis of user activity was also performed. This system version also included the
new consumption visualisation using a pipe metaphor. To gain first insights into incentive dynamics on the
gamified portal, user activity logs in the Swiss case were analysed study (Dec’15-Feb’16). After its launch in
December 2015, little activity occurred on the basic portal compared to the gamified portal, which exhibited
almost twice as many logins as the former [69]. This suggests that the gamification features prompted more
interest, with activity peaking after a mail campaign to current users. An inspection of individual elements
revealed that the consumption chart has been viewed and interacted with the most. Other key elements like
the leaderboard, achievements and actions panels were also accessed more than once by over half of the us-
ers and almost all users collected badges. These indicators suggest that the incentive model is capable of mo-
tivating users to access and use it, and thus to engage with water consumption information. The overall re-
sults suggest that even with a small user community and not a very long period for the incentive model to
yield effects, the system was able to motivate different participation dynamics (ibid.). Even though these
observed dynamics need to be assessed in more detail in the large scale pilot, such differences in responses to
the incentive model highlight the importance of a holistic approach that comprises different motivational
affordances to support the behavioural change process for all users (ibid.).

Consumption effects were measured with respect to a historical yearly baseline for each user. We have ob-
served that users with a low and medium consumption volume achieve the highest reductions (see [72] for
details). After discounting the possible effect of the winter season on lower consumption (to an upper bound
of 25-30%), a water consumption reduction of 3.4-8.4% that could be attributed to the use of the portal re-
mained. This first encouraging result needs to be validated once detailed consumption logs will be made
available for the whole year, enabling us to make a meaningful comparison with the baseline.

Finally, some of the other lessons learned in the design, deployment and evaluation of the SmartH2O system
include:
 Gamification in combination with physical rewards can be a good way to strengthen the incentive
induced by consumption feedback, as physical rewards have proven to be capable of engaging users
who are not necessarily motivated by playful elements and associated virtual or social rewards.
Business factors such as the available budget and the image the utility seeks to communicate to its
customers shape the reward model, in terms of the type of rewards, the number of available rewards,
and the user actions in the applications that make a user eligible for a reward.
 Whereas in traditional approaches the collection of user data requires substantial effort, in
SmartH2O the gamified incentive model has proven to be capable of eliciting user-generated data
about the household composition, water consuming appliances, presence of a garden or balcony and
other factors that determine water consumption levels. These data allow utilities to model the water
demand beyond what can be inferred from aggregated (smart metered) readings by clustering con-
sumers based on socio-psychographic features and/or disaggregating consumption to the level of wa-
ter consumption appliances [73], [74].
 Experiences from SmartH2O and other projects [15] [75] strongly suggest that the sustainability of
effects on water consumption behavior cannot be taken for granted. Rather, utilities must be aware of
the fact that relapse to “old” consumption behavior can and will occur. A significant share of water
consumption behavior is habitual, which is notoriously difficult to change (e.g. [76]), requiring utili-
ties to commit to a long-term implementation of behavioral change interventions and to allocate their
required resources.

Such experiences from the SmartH2O project can support water utilities (or researchers) who intend to de-
velop similar applications, as part of their water demand management strategy and as a way of developing
new kinds of water consumption information services for their customers.

5 Conclusions

Gamification mechanisms appear to be promising and acceptable tools for incentivizing pro-environmental
attitudes and promoting water conservation habits in urban contexts. Following this potential, several EU-
funded projects focused on assessing the effectiveness of gamified tools to support water demand-side man-
agement, integrated with ICT solutions, as well as advanced metering infrastructure. In this chapter, we re-
viewed the most relevant experiences from state-of-the art projects, and presented the SmartH2O platform, a
web-based gamified user portal that we developed as part of the EU-funded SmartH2O project and imple-
mented in two real case studies, in Switzerland and Spain.

Our comparative analysis, as well as the preliminary results we obtained from real-world testing, suggest a
few general take-home messages for the future exploitation of gamification mechanisms to design water de-
mand management strategies. In particular, the number of experiences developing gamified approaches to
water conservation and other environmental purposes in Europe and worldwide values such tools as alterna-
tives/complements to more traditional top-down interventions (e.g., water use restrictions or mandatory ret-
rofitting interventions). Besides, gamified applications do not purely constitute single-direction communica-
tion tools for giving behavioural suggestions to users. Rather, they can easily include interactive modules
incentivizing users to provide data (e.g., demographics), which would be more difficult to collect and update
with traditional surveys or una tantum data gathering campaigns. Therefore, their value to support us-
er modelling and customized demand management activities is increased.

Yet, rigorous studies comparing exhaustively, with a complete set of quantitative and qualitative perfor-
mance metrics, the state-of-the-art gamified methods to enhance awareness and behavioural change toward
environmental issues do not exist. Therefore, findings and consideration on the effectiveness of
such methods should be related to specific case-studies and applications so far, and a generalization and inte-
gration effort is required.

Finally, the preliminary results of the SmartH2O project support the effectiveness of gamified approaches to
pursue water savings, at least in the short-term, and we were able to draw some recommendations for the
future development of such approaches (e.g., combining gamified mechanisms with real, physical re-
wards). Yet, their long-term effectiveness has not generally been assessed so far, as well as ways to keep it
high and avoid the rebound effect. Therefore, future research and system implementations, involving re-
searchers, utilities, and water consumers, should commit to a long-term design and testing of behavioural
change interventions, possibly considering city-scale samples of heterogeneous users and designing alterna-
tive customized demand-side management actions.

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