Household Occupancy Monitoring Using Electricity Meters

Occupancy monitoring (i. e. sensing whether a building or room is currently occupied) is required by many building automation systems. An automatic heating system may, for example, use occupancy data to regulate the indoor temperature. Occupancy data is often obtained through dedicated hardware such as passive infrared sensors and magnetic reed switches. In this paper, we derive occupancy information from electric load curves measured by off-the-shelf smart electricity meters. Using the publicly available ECO dataset, we show that supervised machine learning algorithms can extract occupancy information with an accuracy between 83% and 94%. To this end we use a comprehensive feature set containing 35 features. Thereby we found that the inclusion of features that capture changes in the activation state of appliances provides the best occupancy detection accuracy.