A caregiver support platform within the scope of an ambient assisted living ecosystem (original) (raw)

A Context-aware, Intelligent and Flexible Ambient Assisted Living Platform Architecture

2015

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions support older people in remaining longer in their own environment. For a system to be successful on the market, it is essential to be flexible and adaptable to the individual needs of the elderly person. In this paper, we present an approach for a contextaware, intelligent and flexible AAL platform architecture, that integrates existing concepts for home automation environments with an extendable platform for information, communication and learning to assist elderly users in their daily life. The platform has the intelligence to react on environmental changes, by including data provided by sensors or external services, as well as changes of the medical state of the user by using a person centered ontology to deliver adapted services at any time. The intelligence to do this is assured by lightweight and autonomous software agents. The custom platform itself is realized as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) in the cloud. The setup is a Private Cloud...

Promises and challenges of ambient assisted living systems

The population of elderly people keeps increasing rapidly, which becomes a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and costeffective need to be sought. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a new approach which promises to address the needs from elderly people. Ambient Intelligence technologies are widely developed in this domain aiming to construct safe environments around assisted peoples and help them maintain independent living. However, there are still many fundamental issues in AAL that remain open. Most of the current efforts still do not fully express the power of human being, and the importance of social connections and social activities is less noticed. Our conjecture is that such features are fundamental prerequisites towards truly effective AAL services. This paper reviews the current status of researches on AAL, discusses the promises and possible advantages of AAL, and also indicates the challenges we must meet in order to develop practical and efficient AAL systems for elderly people. In this paper, we also propose an approach to construct effective home-care system for the elderly people.

Design Framework for Ambient Assisted Living Platforms

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

Nowadays the new technological advances offer the possibility to provide a great number of different personalized services that cover the needs of diverse categories of users. The application of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm and the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) concept makes possible the creation of new applications that can significantly improve the quality of life of elderly and dependant people. This paper presents an interaction framework that provides a new generation of user interfaces for AAL services in the context of an AmI-based platform. This solution aims to develop the technological context where elderly and dependant citizens can increase their life independence.

Do We Need an Integrated Framework for Ambient Assisted Living?

Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

The significant increase of ageing population calls for solutions that help the elderly to live an independent, healthy and low risk life, but also ensure their social interaction. The improvements in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) have resulted in the development of equipment that supports ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous communication and intelligent user interfaces. The smart home technologies, assisted robotics, sensors for health monitoring and e-health solutions are some examples in this category. Despite such growth in these individualized technologies, there are only few solutions that provide integrated AAL frameworks that interconnect all of these technologies. In this paper, we discuss the necessity to opt for an integrated solution in AAL. To support the study we describe real life scenarios that help us justify the need for integrated solutions over individualized ones. Our analysis points to the clear conclusion that an integrated solution for AAL outperforms the individualized ones.

Towards a Unified Ambient Assisted Living and Personal Health Environment

Ambient Assisted Living, 2011

The quality of care practice is difficult to judge. Indeed, support and care provision is very personal, i.e., assessments are individual and lead to specific care packages, involving social services, health workers, care agencies. We expect privacy in our own affairs and confidentially from those to whom we disclose them. Therefore, we are in an urgent need for new, technological and formal approaches to problem solving, as the increase of population with special care requirements. Following this line of thought, it is one`s goal to present the Virtu-alECare framework, an intelligent multi-agent system able to monitor, interact and serve its customers, which are in need of care services, based in open standards, expecting not only to fulfil the objectives referred to above, but also to overcome the problems induced by the use of new technologies and formalisms.

The UniversAAL Platform for AAL (Ambient Assisted Living)

Journal of Intelligent Systems, 2015

This article describes the UniversAAL platform, an open platform intended to facilitate the development, distribution, and deployment of technological solutions for Ambient assisted living (AAL). The platform is intended to benefit end users (i.e., assisted persons, their families, and caregivers), authorities with responsibility for AAL, and organizations involved in the development and deployment of AAL services. It consists of an extensive set of resources (some are software and some are models/architectures) aimed at these different groups. The resources are classified into three main groups: runtime support, development support, and community support. The article presents the benefits that can be expected from the widespread adoption of the platform. The article also describes progress on prototype implementations of some of the software resources, and the results of initial evaluations of the platform. The work is partially based on results from earlier European Union-funded research projects in the area.

A Discussion Paper on Designing Ambient Assisted Living Systems

This discussion paper presents preliminary research in the field of Ambient Assisted Living systems. After a brief review of the existing literature, we argue that the research in this field is following a wrong paradigm: rather than creating technology to replace humans in assisting the elderly and disabled people, we should use technology to foster human interactions and enable more caregivers to get involved in this activity.

The architecture of ambient assisted living system

2011 IEEE International Conference on Microwaves, Communications, Antennas and Electronic Systems (COMCAS 2011), 2011

Ambient Assisted Living is an intelligent system of assistance that can help senior citizens to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and extend their lifespan, thus enabling them to expand their active and creative participation in the community. The system provides an interactive environment for people with special needs, based on ubiquitous sensing, individual-environment interaction, context awareness, and learning information systems. It provides a full cycle of processes, including sensing the individual's activity and behavior, preprocessing of sensors data, information aggregation, reasoning, and interaction with the individual and with external factors such as relatives and care services. The system is based on ambient intelligence, i.e. its infrastructure is pervasive, with a large number of distributed devices that communicate between themselves as well as with centralized services.

A Comparison Between Ambient Assisted Living Systems

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

The growing number of older people emerges the need to consider autonomy concerns for those people and their need for intensive care. Plenty of researches, such as those in the domain of Ambient Assisted Living Systems, have been carried out to create enhanced conditions for older and people with disabilities, based on providing ICT solutions that enhance the well-being of elderly people and provide them with well independent daily living. In this paper, for better efficiency for such solutions, different essential requirements should be realized to meet those system objectives towards various users. These requirements are identified and introduced. Set of systems has been introduced with their solutions and provided services architecture, to reach the main goal of this work, by evaluating these systems from identified requirements perspective, by studying the functionalities of each system, if they meet the proposed requirements.