Smart office: wireless sensor network for energy monitoring and user profiling

Abstract

In a world where there are about 7 billion people living and this number is continuously increasing, it is necessary to reduce the resource consumption to achieve a sustainable situation. In this work, a system to detect water and electricity consumption is introduced to identify resource waste and inform the consumers about it. For this purpose, many sensors are deployed in the kitchen of the department in order to gather data of the consumption. These sensors are an alternative to other ways of getting this information that are usually considered as invasive, like a camera. Even though, as far as there are many sensors deployed, the way to put all data together will be using wireless communication. Then, a treatment is performed in order to obtain some statistics about the consumption. These networks can also be accessed by people external to the department, who would be able to get information about their consumption and, consequently, their expenditures. Because all of this, a privacy problem of the enterprise appears, in this case the Electrical Engineering Automatic Control Department. Regarding the wireless communication, di erent protocols will be tested to check their reliability. Furthermore, the data from the di erent sensors makes possible to determine behaviour patterns of the people working there. By using this system, not environmentally friendly actions that lead to resource waste can be easily identi ed and corrected. Again, this opens a discussion about privacy, concerning the di erent people and their habits. To sum up, the system would enable the consumers to decrease their resource consumption, which would lead to an important energy saving in large scale and a reduction in costs in small scale.