Energy-tracking app encourages sustainable behaviors

We've all heard of fitness trackers and apps that help us stay on track with our daily nutrition and exercise, but what about an app to monitor our personal energy usage and carbon footprint?

Just in time for Earth Day, a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has created an energy-tracking app to make reducing day-to-day energy usage more accessible.

The app called "My Earth — Track Your Carbon Savings," is designed the new app with a diary format in which users can choose daily activities to reduce their carbon emissions and energy consumption.

Drawing on parallels between food consumption and energy use, the team designed "My Earth" with approaches used in food-tracking apps that help users catalog their daily eating habits.

The app is organized with five main categories: electricity, recycling, travel, food and usage. Each category includes day-to-day activities as simple as recycling a milk jug to more complicated actions, such as upgrading to a high-efficiency toilet that reduces the need for energy-intensive wastewater treatment.

As users check off activities in their individual diaries, they accumulate saved carbon units. Developers wanted the app to track daily progress visually to help users see how smaller steps can build to achieve a larger goal and that individual actions can have broader impact.

"There is a real disconnect between what people say that they want to do in terms of their attitudes toward the environment and conservation and translating that into actual behavior," says Nancy Wong, professor of consumer science in the UW-Madison School of Human Ecology and designer of the app. "Carbon units are too abstract for people to understand. Translating conservation behaviors into something tangible, such as a growing iceberg, could help."

The free app is available for both iOS and Android platforms. 

Read more at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Phone image via Shutterstock.