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1. A PRACTICAL EVALUATION FOR COOKSTOVE USABILITY

   Moses, Nicholas; MacCarty, Nordica (January 2018, Proceedings of the ... ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences)

   While improved cookstoves have been designed and distributed for decades with the goal of addressing the human health and environmental issues caused by traditional biomass cooking methods, they often have not achieved the intended impact. One of the main reasons for this shortcoming is that engineers often focus on technical attributes of cookstove designs, such as improved fuel and combustion efficiency, but neglect usability. If a stove design does not meet a cook’s needs and preferences, the stove will likely be used only as a supplement to a traditional stove, or not used at all. To help close this gap, a testing protocol for cookstove usability was developed. The proposed protocol is based on established usability practices from fields such as software and consumer product design, and includes usability criteria taken from existing cookstove research and interviews with subject experts. The protocol includes objective and subjective testing methods, is designed to elicit user perceptions of and the relative importance of each usability criterion in a given context, and incorporates ethnographic methods to improve validity in cross-cultural applications and in diverse testing scenarios. This protocol may be useful to stove designers as a way to better understand users and validate or improve designs, to implementers as a method to assist with the selection of the most appropriate stove for a project, and to researchers as a tool to assess cookstoves and cookstove programs. Preliminary field and laboratory work to test the validity of the protocol demonstrated a mixture of meaningful and uncertain results, indicating that while it is a reasonable tool to assess cookstove usability, the protocol requires interpretation of qualitative data and assessment of uncertainty to be most effective. 

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2. Survey based behavior and impact assessment A case study of improved cookstove adoption in rural Honduras

   Pakravan, Mohammad; Laughlin, Katie; MacCarty, Nordica (January 2018, IEEE Global Humanitarian Technical Conference)

   Nearly 40% of the world’s population relies on inefficient burning of biomass using traditional stoves and open fires for their household energy demands. Use of traditional methods contributes to global anthropogenic climate change, and has been attributed to at least 4 million premature deaths every year. In addition, increasing population in middle- and low- income countries pushes the demand for firewood to unsustainable harvest rates leading to deforestation. To address such challenges, many international organizations have worked to provide improved cookstoves for these communities. This study applies surveys incorporating research methods from social sciences focusing on the role of users to evaluate the impacts of these technologies in the field, as well as to understand what motivates consumers to change their traditional practices. By conducting surveys before and two months after dissemination of 390 improved cookstoves in Copan Ruinas, Honduras, this research evaluated the impact of the improved cookstoves for the users and their evaluations of the presented technology. Results suggest that approximately 85% of the households used the improved cookstove as their primary stove. The top three reasons for households to continue using the stove were reported as reductions in smoke emissions, firewood consumption, and time to cook food. For 80% of the households, the level of effort required to cook with the improved cookstove was reported as significantly less than traditional stove. Future work should include sensor-based monitoring and long-term follow up to verify findings and examine impact over time. 

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3. DEVELOPMENT AND PILOT STUDY OF AN INTEGRATED SENSOR SYSTEM TO MEASURE FUEL CONSUMPTION AND COOKSTOVE USE

   Ventrella, Jennifer; MacCarty, Nordica (January 2018, Proceedings of the ... ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences)

   Accurate, accessible methods for monitoring and evaluation of improved cookstoves are necessary to optimize designs, quantify impacts, and ensure programmatic success. Despite recent advances in cookstove monitoring technologies, there are no existing devices that autonomously measure fuel use in a household over time and this important metric continues to rely on in-person visits to conduct measurements by hand. To address this need, researchers at Oregon State University and Waltech Systems have developed the Fuel, Usage, and Emissions Logger (FUEL), an integrated sensor platform that quantifies fuel consumption and cookstove use by monitoring the mass of the household’s fuel supply with a load cell and the cookstove body temperature with a thermocouple. Following a proof-of-concept study of five prototypes in Honduras, a pilot study of one hundred prototypes was conducted in the Apac District of northern Uganda for one month. The results were used to evaluate user engagement with the system, verify technical performance, and develop algorithms to quantify fuel consumption and stove usage over time. Due to external hardware malfunctions, 31% of the deployed FUEL sensors did not record data. However, results from the remaining 69% of sensors indicated that 82% of households used the sensor consistently for a cumulative 2188 days. Preliminary results report an average daily fuel consumption of 6.3 ± 1.9 kg across households. Detailed analysis algorithms are still under development. With higher quality external hardware, it is expected that FUEL will perform as anticipated, providing long-term, quantitative data on cookstove adoption, fuel consumption, and emissions. 

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4. DEVELOPMENT AND PILOT STUDY OF AN INTEGRATED SENSOR SYSTEM TO MEASURE FUEL CONSUMPTION AND COOKSTOVE USE

   Ventrella, J; MacCarty, N (January 2018, Proceedings of the ... ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences)

   Accurate, accessible methods for monitoring and evaluation of improved cookstoves are necessary to optimize designs, quantify impacts, and ensure programmatic success. Despite recent advances in cookstove monitoring technologies, there are no existing devices that autonomously measure fuel use in a household over time and this important metric continues to rely on in-person visits to conduct measurements by hand. To address this need, researchers at Oregon State University and Waltech Systems have developed the Fuel, Usage, and Emissions Logger (FUEL), an integrated sensor platform that quantifies fuel consumption and cookstove use by monitoring the mass of the household’s fuel supply with a load cell and the cookstove body temperature with a thermocouple. Following a proof-of-concept study of five prototypes in Honduras, a pilot study of one hundred prototypes was conducted in the Apac District of northern Uganda for one month. The results were used to evaluate user engagement with the system, verify technical performance, and develop algorithms to quantify fuel consumption and stove usage over time. Due to external hardware malfunctions, 31% of the deployed FUEL sensors did not record data. However, results from the remaining 69% of sensors indicated that 82% of households used the sensor consistently for a cumulative 2188 days. Preliminary results report an average daily fuel consumption of 6.3 ± 1.9 kg across households. Detailed analysis algorithms are still under development. With higher quality external hardware, it is expected that FUEL will perform as anticipated, providing long-term, quantitative data on cookstove adoption, fuel consumption, and emissions. 

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5. IN-FIELD EVALUATION OF AN INTEGRATED SENSOR SYSTEM TO MEASURE FUEL CONSUMPTION AND COOKSTOVE USE IN RURAL HOUSEHOLDS

   Ventrella, Jennifer; MacCarty, Nordica (January 2018, ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences)

   Accurate, accessible methods for monitoring and evaluation of improved cookstoves are necessary to optimize designs, quantify impacts, and ensure programmatic success. Despite recent advances in cookstove monitoring technologies, there are no existing devices that autonomously measure fuel use in a household over time and this important metric continues to rely on in-person visits to conduct measurements by hand. To address this need, researchers at Oregon State University and Waltech Systems have developed the Fuel, Usage, and Emissions Logger (FUEL), an integrated sensor platform that quantifies fuel consumption and cookstove use by monitoring the mass of the household’s fuel supply with a load cell and the cookstove body temperature with a thermocouple. Following a proof-of-concept study of five prototypes in Honduras, a pilot study of one hundred prototypes was conducted in the Apac District of northern Uganda for one month. The results were used to evaluate user engagement with the system, verify technical performance, and develop algorithms to quantify fuel consumption and stove usage over time. Due to external hardware malfunctions, 31% of the deployed FUEL sensors did not record data. However, results from the remaining 69% of sensors indicated that 82% of households used the sensor consistently for a cumulative 2188 days. Preliminary results report an average daily fuel consumption of 6.3 ± 1.9 kg across households. Detailed analysis algorithms are still under development. With higher quality external hardware, it is expected that FUEL will perform as anticipated, providing long-term, quantitative data on cookstove adoption, fuel consumption, and emissions. 

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