Services and Policies for Care At Home

Abstract

Abstract-It is argued that various factors including the increasingly ageing population will require more care services to be delivered to users in their own homes. Desirable characteristics of such services are outlined. The Open Services Gateway initiative has been adopted as a widely accepted framework that is particularly suitable for developing home care services. Service discovery in this context is enhanced through ontologies that achieve greater flexibility and precision in service description. A service ontology stack allows common concepts to be extended for new services. The architecture of a policy system for home care is explained. This is used for flexible creation and control of new services. The core policy language and its extension for home care are introduced, and illustrated through typical examples. Future extensions of the approach are discussed.

Towards personalised home care systems

“…For output, OSGi bundles have been written to control X10 appliances (on, off and dim actions), to control UPnP alarm devices, to interface with SIP (Session Initiation Protocol, used for Internet telephony), and to send text messages for mobile telephones. More details about the policy system implementation can be found in [1].…”

“…If there are multiple actions, the policy server checks for and resolves conflicts before initiating the actions. More details about the policy server can be found in [1].…”

“…This facilitates configuration and evolution. In our previous work [1], we created a lab prototype and successfully demonstrated a policy-based system using data from a variety of home sensors. Sensor data is used to support a variety of services for home care and home automation.…”

A Model-Based Approach to Supporting Configuration in Ubiquitous Systems

“…Components are not limited to those which are locally accessible; for instance some components may be implemented as web services which are hosted remotely. Interaction components and tasks are registered with a service discovery system, supported by an Ontology Service [20], that can be used to hold high-level descriptions of components and tasks. Evaluation functions benefit from the Ontology service which allows reasoning about classes of related components and their effects on the user based on the information held by the ontology service.…”

Managing Home Care Networks

“…multiple triggers combined with 'and'/'or'). Policies can control the home care system [8], but can also help users.…”