The need for reducing our energy consumption footprint and the increasing number of electric devices in today's homes is calling for new solutions that allow users to efficiently manage their energy consumption. Real-time feedback at device level would be of a significant benefit for this application. In addition, the aging population and their wish to be more autonomous have motivated the use of this same real-time data to indirectly monitor the household's occupants for their safety. By breaking down aggregate power consumption into its components, Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring provides information on individual appliances and their current state of operation. Since no additional metering equipment is required, residents are not confronted with intrusion into their familiar environment. Our work aims to depict an architecture supporting non-intrusive measurement with a smart electricity meter and the handling of these data using an open-source platform that allows to visualize and process real-time data about the total energy consumed. As a case study, we describe a series of measurements from common household devices and show how abnormal behavior can be detected.
Supporting the elderly to maintain their independence, safety, and well-being through Active Assisted Living (AAL) technologies, is gaining increasing momentum. Recently, Non-intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) approaches have become the focus of these technologies due to their non-intrusiveness and reduced price. Whilst some research has been carried out in this respect; it still is challenging to design systems considering the heterogeneity and complexity of daily routines. Furthermore, scholars gave little attention to evaluating recent deep NILM models in AAL applications. We suggest a new interactive framework for activity monitoring based on custom user-profiles and deep NILM models to address these gaps. During evaluation, we consider four different deep NILM models. The proposed contribution is further assessed on two households from the REFIT dataset for a period of one year, including the influence of NILM on activity monitoring. To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the first to quantify the error propagated by a NILM model on the performance of an AAL solution. The results achieved are promising, particularly when considering the UNET-NILM model, a multi-task convolutional neural network for load disaggregation, that revealed a deterioration of only 10% in the f1-measure of the framework’s overall performance.
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