Ageing Safely in the Digital Era: A New Unobtrusive Activity Monitoring Framework Leveraging on Daily Interactions with Hand-Operated Appliances

Supporting the elderly to maintain their independence, safety, and well-being through Active Assisted Living (AAL) technologies, is gaining increasing momentum. Recently, Non-intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) approaches have become the focus of these technologies due to their non-intrusiveness and reduced price. Whilst some research has been carried out in this respect; it still is challenging to design systems considering the heterogeneity and complexity of daily routines. Furthermore, scholars gave little attention to evaluating recent deep NILM models in AAL applications. We suggest a new interactive framework for activity monitoring based on custom user-profiles and deep NILM models to address these gaps. During evaluation, we consider four different deep NILM models. The proposed contribution is further assessed on two households from the REFIT dataset for a period of one year, including the influence of NILM on activity monitoring. To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the first to quantify the error propagated by a NILM model on the performance of an AAL solution. The results achieved are promising, particularly when considering the UNET-NILM model, a multi-task convolutional neural network for load disaggregation, that revealed a deterioration of only 10% in the f1-measure of the framework’s overall performance.