JUMP is an online crowdsourcing community hosted by five national laboratories of the US Department of Energy (DOE) and some of the top private companies in the buildings sector. The goal is to broaden the pool of people from whom DOE seeks ideas and to move these ideas to the marketplace faster.

In July, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and CLEAResult launched a Call for Innovation to leverage crowdsourcing to solicit new ideas for saving energy in homes based on smartphone technologies. Modern smartphones are packed with a variety of sensors capable of detecting all kinds of things about their surroundings. Smartphones can determine whether people are home, or close to home, which may be useful for managing their HVAC systems and controlling lighting and appliances. Smartphones can also gather and analyze data to inform homeowners and improve residential energy efficiency.

Infrared images of houses

We responded to the call with a proposal to develop a smartphone app that can be used to create an infrared version of Google’s Street View, which we call Infrared Street View. NREL notified us this week that the proposal has been selected as a finalist of the competition and invited us to pitch the idea at the CLEAResult Energy Forum in Austin, TX next month.

The app will integrate smartphone-based infrared imaging (e.g., FLIR ONE) and Google Map, along with built-in sensors of the smartphone such as the GPS sensor and the accelerometer, to create thermal views of streets at night in the winter in order to reveal possible thermal anomalies in neighborhoods and bring awareness of energy efficiency to people. These infrared images may even have business values. For example, they may provide information about the conditions of the windows of a building.

The app will be based on the SDK of FLIR ONE and the Google Map API, backed by a program running in the cloud to collect, process, and serve data. The latest FLIR ONE model now costs $249 and works with common Android and iOS devices, making it possible for us to implement this idea. A virtual reality mode will also be added to enhance the visual effect. So this could be an exciting IR+VR+AR (augmented reality) project.

You may be wondering who would be interested in using the app to create the infrared street views. After all, the success of the project depends on the participation of a large number of people. But we are not Google and we do not have the resources to hire a lot of people to do the job. Our plan is to work with schools. We have a current project in which we work with teachers to promote infrared imaging as a novel way to teach thermal energy and heat transfer in classrooms. This is an area in science education that every school covers. Many teachers — after seeing an infrared camera in action — are convinced that infrared imaging is the ultimate way to teach thermal science. If this project is used as a capstone activity in thermal science, it is possible that we can reach and motivate thousands of students who would help make this crowdsourcing project a success.

Those who know earlier efforts may consider this initiative a new round to advance the idea. The main new things are: 1) our plan is based on crowdsourcing with potentially a large number of students who are equipped with smartphone-based IR cameras, not a few drive-by trucks with cameras that homeowners have no idea about; 2) the concerns of privacy and legality should be mitigated as students only scan their own houses and neighbors with permissions from their parents and neighbors and only publish their images in the Google Map app when permitted by their parents and neighbors; and, most importantly, 3) unlike the previous projects that do not put people first, our project starts with the education of children and has a better chance to convince adults.