Appliance-Level Monitoring with Micro-Moment Smart Plugs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a micro-moment smart plug system that monitors appliance energy use and environmental factors, aiming to promote energy efficiency and behavioral change through comprehensive data collection and home automation.

Contribution

It presents a novel micro-moment-based smart plug with integrated environmental sensors and home automation, enhancing energy monitoring and user engagement.

Findings

Cost-effective deployment demonstrated

Adequate performance in computation and wireless communication

Enables visualization of energy and environmental data

Abstract

Human population are striving against energy-related issues that not only affects society and the development of the world, but also causes global warming. A variety of broad approaches have been developed by both industry and the research community. However, there is an ever increasing need for comprehensive, end-to-end solutions aimed at transforming human behavior rather than device metrics and benchmarks. In this paper, a micro-moment-based smart plug system is proposed as part of a larger multi-appliance energy efficiency program. The smart plug, which includes two sub-units: the power consumption unit and environmental monitoring unit collect energy consumption of appliances along with contextual information, such as temperature, humidity, luminosity and room occupancy respectively. The plug also allows home automation capability. With the accompanying mobile application, end-users can visualize energy consumption data along with ambient environmental information. Current implementation results show that the proposed system delivers cost-effective deployment while maintaining adequate computation and wireless performance.