Graduate Research Spotlight:
Erin Griffiths - Energy-Efficient Homes
As Erin Griffiths sees it, there are a number of ways to conserve energy and cut household energy bills. You can take a passive approach, investing in new windows, better insulation and energy-efficient appliances, or you can take a dynamic approach, building a sensor network that turns services on and off as occupants move from room to room.
Griffiths, a master’s degree student, is helping Associate Professor Kamin Whitehouse test a prototype of a dynamic system in a series of homes. Griffiths and Whitehouse detect occupancy by placing inexpensive ultrasound and infrared sensors at the threshold of each room. These sensors provide information about the height — and therefore the identity — of individuals passing through them, as well as their direction of movement.
Griffiths has been building the sensors and their enclosures, addressing interference from other wireless networks in the homes, writing scripts to process data and doing signal processing to identify events.
The challenge, as Griffiths, has discovered, is matching data with human behavior. “People don’t always act simply,” she notes. “They might stand in a doorway, neither entering a room or moving away. It’s been fun trying to find the best way to identify specific activities.”
Read more about CS research here.