A software HEMS framework for consumer electronics

The importance of HEMS (home energy management system) has been increasing rapidly due to the global energy problem becoming more significant. Although many of the HEMS have been proposed so far, they are seldom accepted in real residents because of the high cost for providing this service. In order to solve this problem, we propose a software HEMS framework which is totally different from existing solutions in that they do not require any additional hardware. Instead of adding meters to household appliances, we add software on embedded systems that estimates how much electricity is consumed from operating system kernel and device driver information. We have implemented this system on T-Kernel, and the evaluation results showed that our framework can be effectively used to implement HEMS without any additional hardware cost.