Web platform architecture for ambient assisted living

Abstract

Abstract. Current demographic changes have made it necessary to implement innovative solutions in order to respond to elderly people's needs. This paper describes a concept designed to cater for such users' needs via modern technologies. Survey data and end-users feedback were collected and processed in order to identify the most frequent types of use cases, such as in-home health monitoring, house monitoring, fall down detector, automatic door lock, indoor mobility patterns. The architecture we suggest is service oriented, it uses a general representation of data, and protocols for communication and is flexible enough to provide more services than the already existing one. The platform's design for the core subsystem boosts the effectiveness of sensor measurements by applying near real-time processing algorithms via Complex Event Processing engine, or by offering integrated messaging mechanisms. We use the Business Process Management Workflows to define new treatments for the elderly, and to generate medication and medical check alerts. The concept described here opens the way for app developers to extend the platform's functionalities. Developing and deploying the corresponding plug-ins ensure the platform's adaptability requirement.

Technological Ecosystems in Care and Assistance: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Figure 10 shows the results referring to the maturity of the proposed ecosystem solutions in the selected studies, obtained results show that 46% (17 papers, e.g., [9,47,48,53,63,64], etc.) describe an ecosystem conceptualization or have not been tested, 11% (six papers, [6,7,8,61,62,70]) have been tested either as a whole or any of their components have been piloted in lab conditions, 30% (11 papers, [44,45,56,66,69,72], etc.) have been piloted with real users, and finally only three papers ([11,60,67]) describe ecosystems which have been deployed in the real world.…”

“…Figure 11 shows the distribution of papers in terms of the typification of their architecture as described above. It can be seen that the great majority of the proposed architectures follow a cornerstone approach (28 papers, 76% of the total), describing a central technological platform over which actors develop their activities (e.g., [55,56,57,59,69,70,71,72]). Then eight papers (21%) can be typified as infrastructure-based ([8,9,11,46,48,60,61]), and one paper (3%) [58] describes a standard-based ecosystem.…”

“…Different modeling techniques were found, being the ad hoc notation the predominant one as present in 23 papers (62%, e.g., [6,7,8,9,11]), followed by meta-modeling techniques in six papers (16%, [21,48,54,59,68,71]), class diagrams in three papers (8%, [10,43,70]), conceptual maps in three papers (8%, [67,72,73]) and tabular representations in one paper (3%, [45]). Only one paper did not provide any kind of representation [47].…”

“…Examples of the different technologies described in the studies include:Body sensors and medical devices: ECG devices [46,47,63]; blood analyzers [62,66,68]; body thermometers [62]; etc.Ambient sensors: temperature [6,7,66]; humidity [63,65]; gas detectors [65,66]; etc.Smart technologies: smartTV [8,53] PDAs [53]; mobile phones [48,71]; smart gloves [45]; etc.Cameras: [52,57,67,72]Localization and presence sensors: infrareds [7]; RFID [7]…”

“…In addition, as reflected in the literature [84], employed technologies named in the reviewed studies are in correlation with the goal of the ecosystem, i.e., ecosystems aimed at enhancing independent living mainly focus on describing ambient and localization sensors [65,72], whereas those whose main focus is on health related services identify body sensors and medical devices in their solutions [48,60]. Platform based solutions are conceived to accept a wider range of different technologies [6,52,71].…”