Meeting with Tassos

Today I met with Tassos, a researcher from the field of energy and buildings to discuss some specifics of AlertMe's data API. Their group is deploying a set of AlertMe kit to 200 houses, and mentioned that it might be possible for me to use some of the data they're collecting. The kit that is being deployed to each house consists of:

• 1 Hub
• 1 Meter - attached to household electricity entry - power + temperature
• 1 Button - put in resident's car - car's location + temperature
• 1 Motion sensor - living room - resident's motion + temperature
• 1 Door magnet - on boiler - temperature
• 1 Key ring - not used
• 0/1 Smart plug - attached to an arbitrarily chosen appliance - power + temperature

The most interesting point to me was that they no plan for which appliance to attach the smart plug to. He mentioned that they'd be willing to attach it to a range of appliances, e.g. in 20 houses attach it to the fridge, in 20 other houses attach it to the dishwasher etc.

This would be really useful for me for three reasons:

1. I would be able to analyse the readings collected from the smart plugs to investigate the range of features visible from each appliance's signature
2. I would be able to compare signatures from similar appliances in different homes, e.g. investigate the extent to which signatures created by fridges vary
3. I would be able to test my disaggregation algorithms on the household's aggregate data and measure their accuracy against the sub-metered data