As average life expectancy continuously rises, assisting the elderly population with living independently is of great importance. Detecting abnormal behaviour of the elderly living at home is one way to assist the eldercare systems with the increase of the elderly population. In this study, we perform an initial investigation to identify abnormal behaviour of household residents using energy consumption data. We conduct an experiment in two parts, the first to identify a suitable prediction algorithm to model energy consumption behaviour, and the second to detect abnormal behaviour. This approach allows for an initial step for the elderly care that has a low cost, is easily deployable, and is non-intrusive.

In this study we apply clustering techniques for analyzing and understanding households’ electricity consumption data. The knowledge extracted by this analysis is used to create a model of normal electricity consumption behavior for each particular household. Initially, the household’s electricity consumption data are partitioned into a number of clusters with similar daily electricity consumption profiles. The centroids of the generated clusters can be considered as representative signatures of a household’s electricity consumption behavior. The proposed approach is evaluated by conducting a number of experiments on electricity consumption data of ten selected households. The obtained results show that the proposed approach is suitable for data organizing and understanding, and can be applied for modeling electricity consumption behavior on a household level. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

In this paper we address the problem of modeling the evolution of clusters over time by applying sequential clustering. We propose a sequential partitioning algorithm that can be applied for grouping distinct snapshots of streaming data so that a clustering model is built on each data snapshot. The algorithm is initialized by a clustering solution built on available historical data. Then a new clustering solution is generated on each data snapshot by applying a partitioning algorithm seeded with the centroids of the clustering model obtained at the previous time interval. At each step the algorithm also conducts model adapting operations in order to reflect the evolution in the clustering structure. In that way, it enables to deal with both incremental and dynamic aspects of modeling evolving behavior problems. In addition, the proposed approach is able to trace back evolution through the detection of clusters' transitions, such as splits and merges. We have illustrated and initially evaluated our ideas on household electricity consumption data. The results have shown that the proposed sequential clustering algorithm is robust to modeling evolving behavior by being enable to mine changes and update the model, respectively.

In this paper, we present an ongoing work on using a household electricity consumption behavior model for recognizing changes in sleep patterns. The work is inspired by recent studies in neuroscience revealing an association between dementia and sleep disorders and more particularly, supporting the hypothesis that insomnia may be a predictor for dementia in older adults. Our approach initially creates a clustering model of normal electricity consumption behavior of the household by using historical data. Then we build a new clustering model on a new set of electricity consumption data collected over a predefined time period and compare the existing model with the built new electricity consumption behavior model. If a discrepancy between the two clustering models is discovered a further analysis of the current electricity consumption behavior is conducted in order to investigate whether this discrepancy is associated with alterations in the resident’s sleep patterns. The approach is studied and initially evaluated on electricity consumption data collected from a single randomly selected anonymous household. The obtained results show that our approach is robust to mining changes in the resident daily routines by monitoring and analyzing their electricity consumption behavior model.