Services personalization approach for a collaborative care ecosystem

Abstract

Ageing entails several limitations, calling for assistance services adapted to particular elderly’s needs and life style. Provision of such may involve many stakeholders, including relatives, caregivers, professional care people, suppliers and other support entities. The use of collaborative networks has been proposed as a mean of integrating contributions from distinct service providers and promoting collaboration to seek the best options among multiple services. Despite of advances in collaborative networks for elderly care, current research and development in care services are chiefly focused on the development of isolated services, considering only a single service provider, emphasizing excessively techno-centric solutions. The need for dealing with personalization of care services in a collaborative environment is rising in importance and, thus, requires a flexible way to guide the process of ranking and selecting services. In this paper, a method based on fuzzy logic to identify services and corresponding providers thought service adherence criteria is presented. To show the feasibility of the method, an illustrative scenario of elderly life style in which services are ranked based on multiple views, from single to composite services, to show how distinct integrations may result in different recommendations.