Context-aware services for ambient assisted living: A case-study

Abstract

Ambient assisted living is a paradigm that promotes independency in the old age with the support of advanced technologies. Ambient home care systems (AHCS) are specially design for this purpose; they aim at minimizing the potential risks that living alone may suppose for an elder, thanks to their capability of gathering data of the user, inferring information about his activity and state, and taking decisions on it. In this paper, we present a number of context-aware services (heart rate monitoring, medication prompting, generation of agenda reminders, weather alerts, emergency notifications, etc.) for the elder and his caregivers. They run on the top of an AHCS, which collects data from a network of environmental, health and physical sensors. The AHCS follows a layered fusion architecture, formed by an in-home developed context acquisition framework and a context manager (customized on the Context Toolkit) that holds the inference and reasoning functionalities. On the deployed prototype, we analyze the suitability of the selected technical approach for ambient assisted living applications.