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| From New Scientist
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'Smart homes' could track your electrical noise 17:21 10 September 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Kurt Kleiner
Your computer could one day track your movements around the house by
monitoring the electrical noise made by household appliances as you
switch them on and off. Such a system could be cheaper and simpler to
operate than the suite of sensors that researchers currently envisage
for "smart homes".
Scientists and visionaries have long imagined smart homes that could
cater to our every whim. But their ideas all rely on cameras,
microphones or other sensors in every room to track the locations of the
occupants.
The new method relies on a device plugged into a single standard wall
socket that monitors noise in the electrical supply caused by electrical
devices being switched on and off. A computer monitoring the device can
then infer that a person must be in that location.
"The problem I see with a lot of ubiquitous computing research is that
it requires the creation of new infrastructure and technology. A lot of
what we have been focusing on is how can you achieve some of these
things without requiring Joe Blow to buy new stuff," says Gregory D
Abowd, a computer scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in
Atlanta.
In a paper to be presented at the International Conference on Ubiquitous
Computing in Innsbrook, Austria, next week, Abowd and colleagues show
that they could train a computer to distinguish between activity in
different rooms as their lights were switched on and off, or to tell the
signature of microwave oven from that of a ceiling fan.
Lengthy training
To do this, they used a laptop to analyse the frequencies of noise
created in the home power line as appliances were switched on and off.
The researchers trained the computer to recognise specific appliances by
turning them on and off. In all, they tested 19 different electrical
devices in six different homes and achieved accuracies between 85 and
90%.
The system could be useful for a home-automation system that turns
heating or sound systems on and off as people enter and leave rooms, for
instance. It might also be useful for monitoring the activity levels of
older people living on their own.
The main drawback with this method is the amount of time it takes to
train the computer =96 about four hours for a typical house. Although
Abowd points out that installing networks of cameras and sensors is also
time consuming.
The researchers still need to show that the system can distinguish
individual appliances even while other appliances are running. For this
piece of research, they only turned one device on and off at a time.
And the system has obvious limits: if you don't turn anything on or off,
it won't know where you are.
Nevertheless, it has potential, says Gerd Kortuem, a computer scientist
at Lancaster University. "Making use of the infrastructure that already
exists is a smart move." . But it's not clear if the new technique will
be able to replace sensors completely =96 a more likely scenario is to
use the system in conjunction with at least some sensors, he says.
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