Building an Index of Activity of Inhabitants From Their Activity on the Residential Electrical Power Line

In the framework of context awareness within the home, our team is currently assessing the unobtrusive detection of inhabitants´ activity through the monitoring of their use and consumption of electricity. The objective is to develop a system for the remote monitoring of large populations of elderly people living independently at home. To be readily deployable on the field, such a system must be minimally intrusive both for the home environment and for the field professionals (paramedics and social workers) visiting the patients at home. We carried out two successive field experiments to evaluate and to improve our system designed to deliver a single index of daily activity. The first experiment involved 13 elderly persons over a nine-month period (84 240 h data recorded) and the second one 12 elderly over six months (51 840 h). We evaluated both the relevance of the index and the acceptability of the system as a whole. We discovered that electrical activity is a kind of unique “signature” of each person´s activity. Moreover, this profile provides unexpected information on the health status of the subject. We confirmed that the system was unobtrusive and well accepted both by the subjects and by the professionals involved. Our unique index of activity, and its trend over time, can provide timely information to the professionals on the patient.