Electric appliance classification based on distributed high resolution current sensing

Today's solutions to inform residents about their electricity consumption are mostly confined to displaying aggregate readings collected at meter level. A reliable identification of appliances that require disproportionate amounts of energy for their operation is generally unsupported by these systems, or at least requires significant manual configuration efforts. We address this challenge by placing low-cost measurement and actuation units into the mains connection of appliances. The distributed sensors capture the current flow of individual appliances at a sampling rate of 1.6kHz and apply local signal processing to the readings in order to extract characteristic fingerprints. These fingerprints are communicated wirelessly to the evaluation server, thus keeping the required airtime and energy demand of the transmission low. The evaluation server employs machine learning techniques and caters for the actual classification of attached electric appliances based on their fingerprints, enabling the correlation of consumption data and the appliance identity. Our evaluation is based on more than 3,000 current consumption fingerprints, which we have captured for a range of household appliances. The results indicate that a high accuracy is achieved when locally extracted current consumption fingerprints are used to classify appliances.