State Grid Weifang Power Supply Company 

A Light That Should Have Been On
On a winter night in 2023, in an aging residential block in Weifang, Shandong, 82-year-old Grandma Li had not turned on her lights鈥攎ore than three hours past her usual time. Her son was in Beijing, hundreds of miles away. Her daughter lived even farther south. In this city alone, more than 150,000 elderly people live similar lives, on their own, behind closed doors.
Then a quiet alert appeared on the city鈥檚 governance platform: "Suspected anomaly鈥攅lderly resident living alone, Kuiwen District. Please send community grid coordinator immediately." Twenty minutes later, grid coordinator Zhang was at Grandma Li鈥檚 door. She had come home exhausted from a pharmacy run and gone to bed early. Everything was fine.
The alert wasn鈥檛 triggered by a security camera or a smartwatch. It came from a platform built by State Grid Weifang Power Supply Company鈥攐ne that watches over the city鈥檚 elderly residents, around the clock, using nothing more than their electricity meter data.

A Problem No One Had Really Solved
Of Weifang鈥檚 2.16 million senior residents, more than 150,000 live alone. In urban neighborhoods, roughly one in ten elderly residents has no housemates; in rural villages hollowed out by migration, that figure climbs to one in eight. According to a local survey in 2022, 42% of elderly people living alone experience moderate to severe loneliness, and 27% face situations where sudden nighttime illnesses go unnoticed.
Weifang tried smart water-flow monitoring in 2021 to flag inactivity, but the cost was high, coverage was thin, and alerts were slow. Bridging the gap between detection and a real human showing up remained unsolved.

Every Home Has an Electricity Meter
Weifang鈥檚 engineers noticed something: elderly people living alone tend to follow remarkably consistent daily rhythms鈥攔ising, cooking, resting at roughly the same times every day. Their electricity usage traces a predictable curve. When that curve suddenly flattens at midnight, or the rice cooker that always switches on at 7 a.m. stays quiet, something may be wrong.
Working with the Municipal Big Data Bureau, Political and Legal Affairs Commission, and Civil Affairs Bureau, the team built the Smart Senior Care Platform. Every 60 minutes, it collects consumption data from enrolled households, accounts for seasonal variation and individual life patterns, and assigns each resident a color code: green (normal), yellow (watch), red (urgent). Anomalies are instantly routed to 15 community grid service centers; grid coordinators receive a text and are expected on-site within 20 minutes.
Crucially, the system is privacy-preserving. Detailed consumption records stay protected; only an alert status鈥攏ot the underlying data鈥攊s shared with anyone outside the utility.

A City for Better Senior Care Shows Up
An alert is just the beginning. Within two hours, grid coordinators call or visit. Party member service teams carry out elder-friendly upgrades鈥攔ewiring outdated circuits, fitting safety sockets, adapting homes for aging in place. Community volunteers pay utility bills by proxy and help coordinate medical resources. Family members, enrolled in an emergency contact database, receive real-time alerts and baseline life data with their relative鈥檚 consent.
From a reading on an electricity meter, through city data systems, to a grid coordinator鈥檚 knock on a door鈥攅very link in that chain now has someone responsible for it.
Since launch, the platform has generated over 1,900 alerts and delivered timely in-person care to 1,466 households. Coverage expanded from an initial pilot of 456 homes to the entire city, and has since been extended to include elderly residents with disabilities. People鈥檚 Daily and Xinhua News Agency both covered the initiative, and the 鈥淲eifang model鈥?has become a reference point for smart eldercare across China.

What a Light Can Mean
There are no sensors on the wall, no device strapped to a wrist. Just a meter, and a life being lived. Electricity big data has given the city a new kind of awareness鈥攐ne that turns the flicker of a late-night light from a private signal of loneliness into a citywide promise of care. State Grid Weifang has shown that the best way to watch over someone isn鈥檛 to intrude into their life. It鈥檚 simply to be there when they need you.