Proactive Context-Awareness in Ambient Assisted Living
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Proactive Context-Awareness in Ambient Assisted Living

. Changing demographics in our aging population and the impact on government expenditure are currently focusing research attention at new assistive healthcare concepts. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technology aims to enhance the lives of elderly and dependent people by offering them the ability to carry out routine tasks independently. Providing such innovative and intuitive solutions is of increasing interest.

Application of such solutions presents additional challenges such as the integration of hardware and software components whilst achieving heterogeneity and context sensitivity. At the same time autonomy of user and device must be maintained. Ambient Middleware for Context-Awareness (AMiCA) aims to seamlessly provide the connectivity required in highly dynamic environments such as AAL.

This project is concerned with development of a multi-level intelligent reasoning and decision-making approach using perhaps some of the folowing: context-awareness, Swarm Intelligence, Bayesian networks and sensor support to harness and reason over uncertain contextual data typically found in AAL environments via the Cloud.

Task

Read the Open AAL Documentation.

Developing a middleware framework from scratch is a significant task, therefore a practical alternative is the adoption and improvement of an existing middleware platform. The Context Toolkit and OpenAAL frameworks with enhancements such as the intelligent reasoning module, a dynamic discovery module and a distributed computing support module should add the missing functionality required to build context sensitive applications for any domain.

The Context Toolkit and the OpenAAL environments previously mentioned are both Java-based frameworks facilitating deployment in a distributed domain, therefore Java may be worth using for programming the middleware and Sun SPOT sensors. Semantic web technologies such as RDF and OWL/OWLite should also be looked at, to perhaps represent descriptions of context-awareness.