A basic study for realizing life event sensor for home energy management system

Abstract

This chapter describes a long term field data collection system from a person occupied house required for designing a life event sensor. The life event sensor is an activity recognition sensor both for measuring electric power consumption and detecting uses of electronic devices by monitoring high frequency electrical waveform emitted by the devices. A prototype of the life event sensor has been developed and evaluated in five homes prior to this study. The results show the sensor measured power consumption within 1% error and identified uses of devices with over 95% accuracy. The basic capability of the sensor is enough for realizing a home energy management system. The long term field data collection system is constructed so as to collect the annotated field data to enhance the sensor for commercial release. The system consists of three sub-systems and collects parameters of power line, status of electronic devices and life events of residents continually. The system has been installed into two houses and the field test has been started for collecting the annotated field data for one year. An overview of the long term field data collection system and discussion about issues for realizing the life event sensor are described in this chapter.