Requirements engineering of ambient assisted living technologies for people with Alzheimer’s

Abstract

A rapid growth in the ambient assisted living technologies (AALTs) is being witnessed due to the aging society. Evidence suggests that AALTs empower the elderly’s involvement with their surroundings, and hence; improves the quality of their living. Therefore, public service organizations (e.g. The Saudi Alzheimer’s Disease Association (ALZ)) have been established with the aim to raise awareness about AD, in order to reach a comfortable lifestyle for all elders with AD. Moreover, this fact is the motivation behind addressing our problem in the paper. Each AALT has its own special requirements in usage, care, extensibility, reusability, scalability and adaptability. More importantly, there are many other factors that have great influence on those requirements. In this paper we will investigate some of these factors, such as: the environment, the caregiver’s experience, and the elder’s age, culture, and social structure. Furthermore, adaptability and cultural factors are the pivots of our study, to show their influence on designing AALT and specifying their requirements.