Mobile application for renewable energy information dissemination (go renewable)

Abstract

Despite the so many different sources of Renewable Energy (RE) in Uganda, little has been done to inform the public. The existing systems used to disseminate RE information in Uganda have a number of limitations which include not being able to provide answers to what if questions for individuals who wish to inquire about different sources of RE and as well get timely response, not providing for visual presentations on the different sources of RE and not facilitating peer to peer learning. The objective of this research is to develop a mobile application to enhance the dissemination process of RE information to the public anytime, anywhere. The application was developed using Eclipse IDE, Tom Cat Server, MySQL as the backend database and SQLite the front-end database. To achieve the objectives of this project, the user-centered design (UCD) was used with interview guides to conduct the research. UCD approach supports the entire product development process with user-centered activities. The Agile Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) model was used in particular, because the product is tested very frequently, through the release iterations, minimizing the risk of any major failures in future. The application prototype was evaluated by 20 users on different platforms to determine the user’s satisfaction and willingness to use the designed application, to acquire more information on RE technologies and make informed decisions. The majority of the interviewees revealed positive results for the all the questions and a few that were negative mentioned that they don’t have much interest in using mobile applications