Towards Smart Home Data Interpretation Using Analogies to Natural Language Processing

Recent advances in the development of smart homes have led to the availability of a wide variety of devices providing a high level of convenience via gesture and speech control or fully automated operation. Many smart home appliances also address the aspects of safety and electricity savings by automatically powering themselves off after not being used for a while. However, many devices remain in a typical household that are not themselves “smart”, or are not primarily electric (such as heating systems). We address the savings aspect by identifying processes involving the use of multiple devices in the electrical flow data, as captured by a smart meter in a modern household, rather than focusing on a single appliance. Therefore, we introduce a novel approach to usage pattern analysis based on the idea that a pattern of device usages as a result of a resident's ‘routine’ (such as making breakfast) can be interpreted similarly to a natural language ‘sentence’; Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms can then be used for interpreting the residents' behavior. We introduce the notion of bag-oj-devices (BoD), derived from the bag-of-words model used in document classification. In an experiment, we show how we use this model to infer predictions about the inhabitants from device usage, such as the resident leaving for the day or just to fetch the newspaper.