Situation-Aware Framework for Energy Saving in Unattended Activities of Daily Living in Smart Home Environments

Abstract

AbstractActivities of daily living (ADLs) are basic self-care tasks that are necessary for independent living. It is also used to assess aging adults’ functional ability. As people age, they experience impaired awareness, which affects their reasoning, cognitive ability, and consequently impedes their ability to manage or supervise ADLs successfully. Impaired awareness has a potential economic impact on aging adults. For example, recent studies have shown that aging adults with impaired awareness use more energy in homes due to deviation from normal execution of ADLs. This often results in incompletely executed ADLs which are left unattended or unsupervised. Unsupervised ADLs involving appliances with high wattage ratings (e.g., TV, air conditioner) can lead to an increase in the cost of home energy services used by aging adults who desire to age-in-place. Thus, in this paper, we propose a situation-aware framework that leverages a smart home resident's context information with respect to unattended ADLs in mitigating increased energy consumptions in smart home environments.