Exploiting Smart Meter Power Consumption Measurements for Human Activity Recognition (HAR) with a Motif-Detection-Based Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) Approach

Numerous approaches exist for disaggregating power consumption data, referred to as non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM). Whereas NILM is primarily used for energy monitoring, we intend to disaggregate a household’s power consumption to detect human activity in the residence. Therefore, this paper presents a novel approach for NILM, which uses pattern recognition on the raw power waveform of the smart meter measurements to recognize individual household appliance actions. The presented NILM approach is capable of (near) real-time appliance action detection in a streaming setting, using edge computing. It is unique in our approach that we quantify the disaggregating uncertainty using continuous pattern correlation instead of binary device activity states. Further, we outline using the disaggregated appliance activity data for human activity recognition (HAR). To evaluate our approach, we use a dataset collected from actual households. We show that the developed NILM approach works, and the disaggregation quality depends on the pattern selection and the appliance type. In summary, we demonstrate that it is possible to detect human activity within the residence using a motif-detection-based NILM approach applied to smart meter measurements.