An innovative approach for monitoring elderly behavior by detecting home appliance's usage

Detecting how elderly people interact with their surrounding environment, especially with domestic electrical appliances, is an important parameter to assess Mild Cognitive Impairments and frailty issues. This paper proposes an innovative approach for monitoring elderly behavior by detecting home appliance's usage. It is based on an unobtrusive smart meter that periodically measures the global power consumption in the house, associated with some smart plugs for punctually monitoring specific electrical devices. This infrastructure has been implemented and validated within the Personal Data Capturing System of the City4Age Platform, where, joined with other provided monitoring systems, can feed risk detection algorithms with more accurate data. Summarizing, implemented system, although simple and at low cost, is able to combine data provided by designed power meter with those of smart meter plugs and, by means of implemented algorithms, to detect unusual elder behavior, moreover resulting reliable and accurate.