Edge AI for Real-Time Anomaly Detection in Smart Homes
Manuel J. C. S. Reis, Carlos Serôdio
Abstract
The increasing adoption of smart home technologies has intensified the demand for real-time anomaly detection to improve security, energy efficiency, and device reliability. Traditional cloud-based approaches introduce latency, privacy concerns, and network dependency, making Edge AI a compelling alternative for low-latency, on-device processing. This paper presents an Edge AI-based anomaly detection framework that combines Isolation Forest (IF) and Long Short-Term Memory Autoencoder (LSTM-AE) models to identify anomalies in IoT sensor data. The system is evaluated on both synthetic and real-world smart home datasets, including temperature, motion, and energy consumption signals. Experimental results show that LSTM-AE achieves higher detection accuracy (up to 93.6%) and recall but requires more computational resources. In contrast, IF offers faster inference and lower power consumption, making it suitable for constrained environments. A hybrid architecture integrating both models is proposed to balance accuracy and efficiency, achieving sub-50 ms inference latency on embedded platforms such as Raspberry Pi and NVIDEA Jetson Nano. Optimization strategies such as quantization reduced LSTM-AE inference time by 76% and power consumption by 35%. Adaptive learning mechanisms, including federated learning, are also explored to minimize cloud dependency and enhance data privacy. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of deploying real-time, privacy-preserving, and energy-efficient anomaly detection directly on edge devices. The proposed framework can be extended to other domains such as smart buildings and industrial IoT. Future work will investigate self-supervised learning, transformer-based detection, and deployment in real-world operational settings.