IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July/August 2023 - 58

Healthcare with Wireless Communication
Chalmers et al.28 explored this idea further
and presented a new approach for unobtrusively
monitoring people in their homes to support
independent living. The U.K. NHS has conducted
a trial to assess how data from smart meters
could help monitor at-home patients. The work
was to see how information on energy usage can
be interpreted by AI algorithms to check on
patients.29 The Department for Business, Energy
and Industrial Strategy mentioned being able to
monitor a patient at home shows how innovative
technologies enabled by smart meters can
improve many aspects of a patient's life, not just
the energy use.
The capacity to identify use patterns of individual
appliances allows for a greater understanding
to be developed of the behavioral
patterns of occupants. For example, unusual
energy use overnight may be evidence that an
occupant is experiencing sleep disturbances.
Furthermore, analysis of the combination of
uses of appliances, and variations in these offers
the potential to infer different forms of household
practices, which can then be linked back to
more understanding of the social purposes of
that sequence of appliance use.
Presently, there is no established way to classify
the behaviors and pathologies detected by
smart meter health studies. It is suggested to
take a pragmatic approach to track the diminishing
range of daily tasks, such as cooking, that a
patient can perform as self-limiting conditions
worsen. In this way, occupant health conditions
might be detected through changes in appliance
use by observing smart meter data. Each of
these changes may be related to memory problems,
the decline of social relationships, the
deterioration of personal hygiene, and hyperactivity
or inactivity.
Depression ismentioned in Ghassemian et al.'s
work,30 as a condition that their outlined energy
use monitoring architecture may be able to detect
in its early stages. Wider infrastructural architectures
required to integrate smart meters with
home area networks, consumer access devices
and cloud computing facilities were reported in
Chalmers et al.'s work.31 Kalogridis and Dave32
reported that appliances that have been focused
on include kettles. The alarmsystemmonitors kettle
activity and sends a notification when the
58
kettle has not been used as expected. Chalmers
et al.33 used an energy monitor at a 1-10 second
measurement frequency to train a device identifier,
extracting a unique energy use profile for each
device. The data were categorized into abnormal
and normal usage patterns. Such processes are
common in NILM and as the sophistication of NILM
increases, a wider range of devices will be detected
with greater accuracy. In another use case, Noury
et al.34
gave social workers the progression of
health as night-time activity related to the progression
of Alzheimer's disease. Remote activity monitoring
of electricity use records provided an extra
tool for the social worker to aid their understanding
of the development of the condition.
A typical challenge for implementing smart
meters is how to integrate them within the infrastructure
and set up custom-tailored smart
metering use cases. One way to achieve these
goals is by using an IoT platform that offers outof-the-box
solutions and templates for smart
metering.
Reference29 reported an initial six-month clinical
trial has been completed. Energy readings
were monitored every 10 seconds and used to
identify interactions with appliances in multiple
homes. By detecting how often and when appliances
are used, routine behavior was established.
This provided the possibility to identify
any abnormal behavior when the interaction pattern
changed and can be used to raise alerts
when required. The results demonstrate that the
system can monitor and support patients in an
unobtrusive and personalized manner.
There are conflicting views on the impact of
smart meters on health. As radiofrequency (RF)
radiation is a possible carcinogen, and smart
meters give off RF radiation, it is possible that
smart meters may increase cancer risk. However,
Public Health England has carried out an
extensive program of research to assess exposures
from smart meters as the technology is
rolled out in the U.K. The results confirm that
exposure to radio waves from smart meters is
well below the guidelines set by the International
Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection.35
The study also concluded that exposure
to the radio waves produced by smart meters is
likely to be much lower than that from other
everyday devices, such as mobile phones. For a
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