Virtual Occupancy Sensing: Using Smart Meters to Indicate Your Presence

Occupancy detection enables energy efficiency, comfort, and space utilization but typically requires custom sensors, calibration, and maintenance. Leveraging widely deployed electricity meters, we develop non-intrusive, cost-effective occupancy detection methods suited for limited or no labeled data. Evaluations on residential and commercial buildings show binary occupancy detection accuracy comparable to fully supervised models (≈78–93% in residences, ≈90% in offices).