LocalSense: An Infrastructure-Mediated Sensing Method for Locating Appliance Usage Events in Homes

In this paper, we introduce a novel technique called Local Sense for detecting appliance usage events in a household by leveraging existing home power infrastructure. Specifically, the Local Sense technique works by purely analyzing the records taken from the main power meter. The main power meter is installed in a household to measure the overall real time aggregated power consumption in terms of wattage and voltage for the whole load of appliances in a household. The Local Sense technique requires no additional apparatuses being installed in existing household power infrastructure, which significantly reduces the cost for enabling the location-aware power usage information over existing techniques. The idea behind the Local Sense system is to reflect the fact that different outlets are with different power line impedances, which causes different power dissipation even for the same appliance usage. By identifying the additional power dissipation, detecting the appliance usage events at outlet levels is therefore possible. The proposed technique is validated in a research lab and preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.