A Non-Intrusive and Cost-Effective IoT-Based System for Smart Monitoring of Power Consumption

Abstract

Electrical utility companies in developing countries traditionally employ non-smart energy meters to measure their users' electricity consumption, with billing conducted on a monthly or quarterly basis. However, there is an emerging market, especially in developing countries, for customers to measure their day-To-day energy usage, similar to how they track their internet data consumption. This project aims to contribute to addressing this demand by designing and developing a non-intrusive and cost-effective ESP-32-based optical measuring device that can autonomously and accurately take imagery measurements from electrical utility meters, carry out cloud-based extraction of data using optical character recognition and transmission to an interactive web application for users to access their current and historical electricity usage records remotely in a more informative way.