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Abstract. The recent increase in smart meters installations in households and small bussiness by electric companies has led to interest in monitoring load techniques in order to provide better quality service and get useful information about appliance usage and user consumption behavior. This works summarizes the current state of the art in Non Intrusive Load Monitoring from its beginning, describes the main process followed in the literature to perform this technique and shows current methods and techniques followed nowadays. The possible application of this techniques in the context of ambient intelligence, energy efficiency, occupancy detection are described. This work also points the current challenges in the field and the future lines of research in this broad topic.

In our day to day life, the environmental conditions, and especially the temperature and humidity of the air that surrounds us, go unnoticed. However, in many cases, these parameters play an important role in the use of materials since they modify their electrical properties. It is necessary to predict what this behaviour will be as these environmental conditions can introduce or improve desirable properties in the material, especially of textiles. The nature of these is to be dielectric, and therefore have a minimal DC electrical conductivity that is currently impossible to measure directly, so a methodology has been proposed to obtain the DC electrical resistivity through the method of discharging a condenser. For this purpose, a system was developed based on a static voltmeter, a climatic chamber and a control and data capture units. In order to validate the proposed system and methodology a study using both is described in this work. The study made it possible to verify that the most influential factor in establishing the values of the electrical parameters of a textile material is the nature of the fibres of which it is composed, although the influence of environmental conditions in fibres is also significant.

Nowadays, the depopulation of Europe’s rural areas and the ageing of the population in these areas has led to the disappearance of basic services such as supermarkets, fishmongers, household goods, etc. In response to this problem, there are European and local initiatives to mitigate these effects by investing in Internet and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure and logistics services for these areas with the aim of moving services to these isolated areas. The problem with these services lies in the difficulty of the use of ICT by aged people due to digital divide and, at the same time, the high cost in human resources, time, vehicles, and fuel presented by delivery services in these areas. This work presents a system that combines the use of intelligent personal assistants (IPA) to facilitate access to information technology for aged people to place orders and the optimization of delivery routes in a rural environment by a socially-oriented logistics company. This work presents a case study based on the fixed delivery routes of a social logistics company and describes how the proposed system could help in the optimization of routes and the reception of orders by the elderly via ICTs thanks to the use of IPAs. Subsequent to the study, route cost savings have been observed as well as the homogeneity of the cost of the routes it can provide compared to a static and predefined fixed route planning. This study also shows how the IPAs make possible the reception of orders in real time placed by the older adults from their homes. This work is aimed at improving the sustainability of services in depopulated rural areas while saving costs for the logistics companies that perform these services.

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