An Ambient Assisted Living Framework Supporting Personalization Based on Ontologies
Abstract
As the population in many countries is steadily aging, allowing elderly people to stay longer at home is a growing concern. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) proposes new techniques to help people remain autonomous, based on ambient intelligence. We present an ontology-based framework in which ontologies enable the expression of users' preferences in order to personalize the system behavior. They are also used for the discovery and interconnection of devices, the storage and retrieval of collected data and the transmission of actions. This way, the behavior of the system may be expressed using high-level logic rules. Another important contribution is the addition of a diagnosis service that monitors the run-time behavior of the AAL system only by using sensors discovered opportunistically at run-time and knowledge about physical laws, not pre-defined control loops. Finally, this paper describes an actual implementation, with precise technological details, in order to prove the feasibility of the technical choices, and provide implementation ideas for future projects.