A low-cost smart sensor for non intrusive load monitoring applications

Next generation Smart Cities have the potential to enhance the citizens quality of life and to reduce the overall energy expenditure. In particular, emerging smart metering technologies promise to greatly increase energy efficiency in the residential and industrial areas. In this context, new power metering methods such as Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) can provide important real-time information about the contribution of any single appliance. In this paper, we present a complete hardware-software design that concentrates locally an efficient event-based supervised NILM algorithm for load disaggregation. This new kind of power analysis, which usually requires high computing capability, is executed real-time on a low-cost and easy-to-install smart meter ready for the Internet of Things (IoT).