Enabling Personalisation of Remote Elderly Assistant Applications

Abstract

One of the goals of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions is to extend the time that elderly people can live independently in their preferred environments by using ICT technologies for personal healthcare. However, in order to be optimal, remote monitoring services and health-related interventions should be strongly personalised to specific individuals' requirements, preferences, abilities and motivations, which can vary among the elderly and even dynamically evolve over time for the same person, depending on changing user needs and conditions associated with the current context of use. In this paper we present how a platform for the development of context-dependent applications by non-technical users has been customized for remotely monitoring and assisting elderly people at home. The platform has been integrated with an application for remotely assisting elderly people at home. The user editable personalisation features are specified by using trigger-action rules. The way to personalise applications through the platform has been tested with some elderly people and informal caregivers, and the feedback they reported in the test was encouraging.