Semantic Plug’N’Play For Ambient Assisted Living

In Singapore, as many other countries in the world, population is getting older.This evolution is generating major changes in our society. Among these changes, weobserve an increasing number of people with mild dementia. These people can notbe totally independent. They need a caregiver to help them in case of trouble, and toprovide them basic service. However, the number of caregiver is not unlimited, andeven elder people would prefer to live in their own houses as long as possible,rather than going to nursing home. A solution is to provide ambient assisting to theireveryday life.Meanwhile, looking at technological evolution, the simple classification oflaptop and desktop is no more accurate. Computers tend to become more and morepervasive. It means that, with the wide expansion of the Internet with the fastevolution of wireless communication, a computer system is no more limited to onemachine. We see more and more sensors integrated in our environment. As outputdevices, a TV, a tablet, a smart phone, a speaker tend to replace the single screen.Computer systems are now integrated in our environment, and communication tendsto be machine to machine, with user at the end of the process, rather than human tomachine.Pervasive Computing is a real opportunity. It becomes a reliable solution tohelp elder people with mild dementia, through Ambient Assisted Living.IPAL laboratory is doing researches on Ambient Assisted Living. We want toprovide seamless and stable solutions within further large deployments. Since everyhouse is different, and everybody has different habits of life, it is impossible todeploy a hard-coded solution everywhere. The purpose of research is to findalternative solutions to insure scalability in both installation and execution of thereasoning.In this context, this report is introducing a process of redesign andimplementation of a stable and scalable architecture. First objective was to give aproof of concept, merging a dynamic sensor management within a reasoningplatform. Once this proof of concept done, it was necessary to redesign the wholearchitecture, taking advantage of experience acquired by IPAL team during lastyears. The prototype of the platform and reasoning system has been implemented andtested. However, the reasoning results cannot be considered as stable, anddeployment are still not convenient. The main issue is not in developing a programthat is running, is how to ensure its extensibility and reliability.Ambient Assisted Living is an emerging field of computer sciences. It is underactive development and not matures yet. In order to offer a reliable framework ofAmbient Assisted Living, three main features should be focused: modularity ofthe architecture, reliability of the reasoning, and standardization ofmachine-to-machine communication protocols.