Real-Time Energy Measurement for Non-Intrusive Well-Being Monitoring of Elderly People -- a Case Study

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a non-intrusive, real-time energy measurement system using tiny beacons to monitor elderly people's well-being by analyzing their electricity consumption patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a novel non-intrusive energy monitoring method with real-time analysis and anomaly detection for elderly care.

Findings

Energy consumption profiles correlate with daily activities.

Anomaly detection identifies unusual energy usage.

System provides discreet insights for caregivers.

Abstract

This article presents a case study demonstrating a non-intrusive method for the well-being monitoring of elderly people. It is based on our real-time energy measurement system, which uses tiny beacons attached to electricity meters. Four participants aged 67-82 years took part in our study. We observed their electric power consumption for approx. a month, and then we analyzed them, taking into account the participants' notes on their activities. We created typical daily usage profiles for each participant and used anomaly detection to find unusual energy consumption. We found out that real-time energy measurement can give significant insight into someone's daily activities and, consequently, bring invaluable information to caregivers about the well-being of an elderly person, while being discreet and entirely non-intrusive.