Energy-Aware User Interfaces and Energy-Adaptive Displays

The utility of a mobile computer, such as a handheld or a laptop, is largely constrained by battery life. The display stands out as a major consumer of battery energy, so reducing that consumption is desirable. In this paper, we propose and study a novel approach, energy-aware user interfaces on energy-adaptive displays, to reduce display power consumption. We make three main contributions. First, we log and analyze several hundreds of hours of display usage for different classes of computing users and show that, consistently, the screen usage of a typical user is often associated with content that can be displayed in smaller and simpler displays with significantly lower energy use. We leverage these insights to propose simple display designs that use emerging OLED (energy-adaptive) display technologies and energy-aware software interfaces to match display energy consumption to the functionality required by the workload/user. Modeling the power benefits from this approach shows factor...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: COMPUTER
• Authors: Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Erik Geelhoed, Meera Manahan, Ken Nicholas
• Keywords: COMPUTER 2006, Display Energy Consumption, Display Power Consumption, Simple Display Designs