Unobtrusive Detection of Home Appliance's Usage for Elderly Monitoring

Many elderly people spend a lot of time in their homes, doing simple or complex activities that often involve the usage of electrical devices. Therefore, detecting how elderly people use household appliances and digital devices is indicative for early detecting the onset of Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI) and frailty conditions. This paper proposes a novel approach for monitoring elderly behavior by detecting home appliance's usage. It is based on an unobtrusive infrastructure composed of a smart meter that constantly measures the global power consumption in the house, supported by some smart-plugs for monitoring specific electrical devices. This infrastructure has been implemented and validated within the H2020 City4Age Project.