An Architecture for Embedded Systems Supporting Assisted Living
This work addresses the challenge of creating flexible AAL systems for elderly populations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing vertical solutions.
The authors tackled the problem of reusing and adapting Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems across different domains by proposing an architectural solution that decouples data acquisition from reasoning, and they tested it in a fall detection system.
The rise in life expectancy is one of the great achievements of the twentieth century. This phenomenon originates a still increasing interest in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technological solutions that may support people in their daily routines allowing an independent and safe lifestyle as long as possible. AAL systems generally acquire data from the field and reason on them and the context to accomplish their tasks. Very often, AAL systems are vertical solutions, thus making hard their reuse and adaptation to different domains with respect to the ones for which they have been developed. In this paper we propose an architectural solution that allows the acquisition level of an ALL system to be easily built, configured, and extended without affecting the reasoning level of the system. We experienced our proposal in a fall detection system.