PeerAssist: A P2P platform supporting virtual communities to assist independent living of senior citizens

Abstract

This paper describes the system architecture and status of PeerAssist, an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) project that aims at designing, implementing, and demonstrating a flexible Peer-to Peer (P2P) platform, which will allow elderly people (not necessarily familiar with information technology) to build virtual communities dynamically based on interests and needs they share. The PeerAssist technology platform will facilitate establishing on demand ad-hoc communities with friends, family, neighbors, caregivers, etc. The community building and P2P interaction is achieved using information extracted from peer roles and profiles, context that describes the overall user environment, and the specific request initiated or service provided by a peer, all of which are represented semantically in a machine understandable form. An end-user request (query) is first represented semantically and then routed through the network in order to find semantically matching peers. The selected peer-to-peer platform exploits the system's intelligence to provide connectivity at the network level optimized to efficiently serve the objectives of the system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.