Wireless Stove Use Monitors (wSUMs) for Remotely Measuring Cookstove Usage: Vodafone Project “100 Million Stoves”Final Report: May, 2015.
Authors: Ilse Ruiz-MercadoJenny Eav, Pablo Venegas, Mayur Vaswani, Tracy Allen, Dana Charron, Kirk R. Smith
The objective of this project was to build a wireless sensor platform to verify stove use and enable smart monitoring of large-scale stove projects. The main expected market was investors and disseminators planning to tap funding in what was, at the time, a rapidly emerging carbon market in the past ten years. Expanding on previous implementations of non-wireless Stove Use Monitors (SUMs), the aim of this project was to develop a wireless version that could be deployed in a carefully selected subsample across millions of households to verify use in a statistically valid manner and provide information valuable to dissemination programs, donors, and investors.
Before the SUMs, the methods available for determining adoption dynamics and use rates were limited to standard survey methods that relied on user’s recall or observations that are often intrusive, imprecise and expensive to carry out as they require frequent visits to the households. The standard type of SUMs are small metal buttons attached to stoves to datalog temperature changes over several months. Their data had to be downloaded to a computer by physical contact (e.g. data cable) and later the data files managed and analyzed. These non-wireless SUMs provide objective, quantitative and unobtrusive measures of stove use that have themselves revolutionized understanding of stove adoption and usage. They do, however, require significant resources to analyze the data and cannot be scaled to millions because they still require household visits.
Our project evolved to develop wireless Stove Use Monitors (wSUMs) in which summary statistics of usage are transmitted to a handheld reader via a short-range wireless technique. The reader is carried by someone in the village making a monthly walk through. The summary usage instantaneously displayed does not require further analysis and can be uploaded to a central data repository. Extensive testing and modification through several versions occurred by an interactive process involving lab and simulated testing in Berkeley and several villages in Mexico and India. A number of technical obstacles, including those related to battery life, radio range, and efficient data algorithms were addressed. A thermal electric option (i.e. thermoelectric generator) was deployed for providing power for the wSUMs at the stove, but this proved to be inadequate and was abandoned.
After a working technology was in hand, a business canvas was conducted to evaluate the potential for a sustainable business model for the wSUMS. Unfortunately, in the years immediately after the project started, the combination of the global economic downturn and the near collapse of the official carbon market, greatly reduced what had seemed to be a potential large demand for hands-off stove monitoring at large scale for stove carbon projects.
In addition, two other wireless sensing technologies came onto the scene, each, however, focused on use of cell phones for real time monitoring from any distance, a route that we did not take and thus are not direct competitors. As we complete this report, however, there is perhaps an entirely new business opportunity through the growing recognition in the international clean stove community that interventions are most effective if pursued at the community (village) level, in combination with several national programs being promulgated. Our “walk-through” system would seem ideally suited for such an application.
