GAIA has created an innovative ICT ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both the users (faculty, staff, students and eventually parents through their children) and buildings that will motivate and support citizens’ behavioral change to achieve greater energy efficiency. The developed solutions consist of an ecosystem of sensor deployments, services, applications and games focusing on different energy efficiency scenarios. On the one hand, GAIA facilitates monitoring and profiling of the energy use of users, while on the other hand, it provides them with guidelines in an educational manner, so that they may act as actuators regulating and defining their energy consumption.
In general, the objectives of GAIA are the following:
- Engage the Educational Community
- Development of a Culture for Energy-Efficient Living
- Utilization of Energy-Consumption Data to Improve Efficiency of Buildings
- Educate towards Collective Use of Resources
- Competitions Across Communities
- Operation at all Levels of Education and Real-Life Validation
GAIA’s impact
- Over 8000 students and educators reached directly during the project, with even more after the end of the project through established dissemination networks
- 25 educational sector buildings in 3 European countries
- sets of educational material and handbooks will be produced, available in Italian, Greek, Swedish and English
- reductions of over 15% on the energy that can be influenced by the end-users
