Detecting anomalies in activities of daily living of elderly residents via energy disaggregation and Cox processes

Abstract

Monitoring the health of the elderly living independently in their own homes is a key issue in building sustainable healthcare models which support a country’s ageing population. Existing approaches have typically proposed remotely monitoring the behaviour of a household’s occupants through the use of additional sensors. However the costs and privacy concerns of such sensors have significantly limited their potential for widespread adoption. In contrast, in this paper we propose an approach which detects Activities of Daily Living, which we use as a proxy for the health of the household residents. Our approach detects appliance usage from existing smart meter data, from which the unique daily routines of the household occupants are learned automatically via a log Gaussian Cox process. We evaluate our approach using two real-world data sets, and show it is able to detect over 80% of kettle uses while generating less than 10% false positives. Furthermore, our approach allows earlier interventions in households with a consistent routine and fewer false alarms in the remaining households, relative to a fixed-time intervention benchmark.

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