PressureML: Modelling Pressure Waves to Generate Large-Scale Water-Usage Insights in Buildings

Several studies have indicated that delivering insights and feedback on water usage has been effective in curbing water consumption, making it a pivotal component in achieving long-term sustainability objectives. Despite a significant proportion of water consumption originating from large residential and commercial buildings, there is a scarcity of cost-effective and easy-to-integrate solutions that provide water usage insights at a reasonable spatio-temporal granularity in such structures. Furthermore, existing methods for disaggregating water usage necessitate training data and rely on frequent data sampling to capture patterns, both of which pose challenges when scaling up and adapting to new environments. In this work, we aim to solve these challenges through a novel end-to-end approach which records data from pressure sensors and uses time-series classification by DNN models to determine room-wise water consumption in a building. This consumption data is then fed to a novel water disaggregation algorithm which can suggest a set of water-usage events, and has a flexible requirement of training data and sampling granularity. We conduct experiments using our approach and demonstrate its potential as a promising avenue for in-depth exploration, offering valuable insights into water usage on a large scale.