Service Matching in Online Community for Mutual Assisted Living

Abstract

Elder people are becoming a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. Our previous study suggests that mutual assisted living community, where dwellers make contributions to the community. Thus community resources could be fully utilized and requested services would be provided in a prompt way. We used service oriented architecture (SOA) to orchestrate the available resources inside the community; and we organize the services into different forms such as formal ones (carried out by professionals, etc), informal ones (assisted by relatives, volunteers, .etc) and even as group activities. We expect such a community could help not only efficiently utilizing the social resources in maintaining the independent living of the elderly people, but also helping these people maintain their connections to the society and bring them entertainment, so that the quality of their living standard may be improved at the same time. This paper continues the track of the previous studies on building mutual assistance communities. Service matching algorithms are developed providing flexible choices on both requested services content and the organization forms of the services.