Customisable assistive plans as dynamic composition of services with normed-QoS

Abstract

Ambient assisted living solutions (AAL) aim to improve the quality of life, especially of elderly with cognitive and physical disabilities, by providing assistive tasks such as medication management, reminders of daily activities or medical tests. However, the loss of physical functions (such as mobility, eyesight and hearing), as well as the loss of cognitive functions (starting from amnesia to severe disabilities as dementia or Alzheimer), require appropriate solutions in order to offer personalised assistive tasks according to user needs and characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology that is based on the integration of a service-oriented approach with normative reasoning to automatically generate assistive tasks customised for different target user’s profiles, and deployable in any AAL environment. The formalisation of the conceptual steps of the methodology is provided, together with a framework implementing them. The advantages of dynamic customisation obtained by decoupling the functional and not functional aspects of assistive technology are shown through a validation scenario.