Life pattern sensor with non-intrusive appliance monitoring

This paper presents a life pattern sensor with a new residents´ behavior monitoring method for a health care system. The life pattern sensor detects operations of appliances from electrical current generated by their operating, and identifies patterns of daily residents´ behavior based on the correlation of operating appliances. The sensor reduces the system cost by avoiding installation of massive sensor nodes and keeps residents´ privacy without intrusion of the house, in comparison with legacy systems like the video-based health care system. The sensor is implemented by utilizing an algorithm with the wavelet transform method and installed in five real houses for a couple of weeks. Accuracy of the identifying appliance detection and the result of the life pattern estimation were evaluated through the field test.