After exactly one year of making a video about our Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) project , I finally got approval from our funding source to release it. Obviously, the current prototype is different from what is shown in the video, but nevertheless, it provides a quick overview of the main idea behind the project.

The goal of this project is to develop simple and inexpensive solutions for obtaining appliance-specific electricity consumption information from easy-to-obtain data sources like the overall power of the building. It’s the idea for which we recently received $1.5M from the National Science Foundation.

We attempt to detect and correctly identify state-transitions for individual appliances in a building (e.g., a light-bulb going from state “off” to state “on”), by carefully analyzing the overall voltage and current signals for the building’s electrical distribution system. We also explore how different statistical and machine learning tools can be applied to solve the problem.

NILM has been around for more than two decades, but mainly as a research topic. What we really want to do is to take it a step further and find out what are the obstacles that we need to overcome to bring it to homes.

I will be posting more about it now that I finally found a quick way to introduce it to all of you (i.e., the video). There are also some interesting links to the other project I am working on: Sensor Andrew.

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