Services Evolution in Elderly Care Ecosystems

Abstract

The aging process typically requires personalized care services for each individual. In this context, a collaborative elderly care ecosystem can support the provision of integrated services that may combine contributions from multiple providers. Through composition of services a personalized solution, tailored to the individual customer, respecting her/his requests, preferences, lifestyle, and constraints, can be achieved. An additional issue the ecosystem must deal with is the problem of evolution, as individual’s care needs are not static over time. Consequently, the care services need to evolve accordingly to keep the elderly’s requirements satisfied. This process of services’ adaptation is challenging since many services can be dependent on each other, and there are various constraints that need to be observed before adaptating and enacting new services. In this paper, we exploit socio-technical aspects of service adaptation in the context of elderly care ecosystems. Starting with a service personalization method previously proposed, we introduce various cases of evolution of elderly care services in response to new requirements. The method considers customer’s inputs and suggests evolution plans based on the MAPE-K methodology. An application example is then introduced to illustrate the approach.