Amazingly, I can actually speak to this. I'm Ph.D. student in Shwetak Patel's lab, and yes, this looks to be extremely similar to the ElectriSense [1] work done

Amazingly, I can actually speak to this. I'm Ph.D. student in Shwetak Patel's lab, and yes, this looks to be extremely similar to the ElectriSense [1] work done by Sidhant Gupta (now at Microsoft Research). The water analogue was Eric Larson's Ph.D. work, and was much more difficult from a DSP perspective due to two separate issues: * When water is flowing without turbulence (laminar flow) it doesn't leave much of a signature on flow or pressure sensors * Any kind of signature that does exist is often changed significantly depending on the network of pipes that stand between the single point sensor and the source of the water event. For these two reasons it took a while for us to work out a high enough accuracy for the water stuff (in the end we used a water pressure sensor plugged in close to your water heater as a fairly central point that most people can access easily) and that was published as HydroSense [2]. We like our *Sense names. :P HydroSense was indeed bought up by Belkin, and they are pushing it forward in a way that we just cannot do in academia, so that's a good thing. ElectriSense I don't remember exactly what the IP status of it is, but I do know at least one student was working on some interesting extensions of it that may be published in the next year. [1] http://ubicomplab.cs.washington.edu/publications/electrisense/ http://ubicomplab.cs.washington.edu/publications/electrisens... [2] http://ubicomplab.cs.washington.edu/publications/a-longitudinal/ http://ubicomplab.cs.washington.edu/publications/a-longitudi...