An intelligent agents reasoning platform to support smart home telecare

Abstract

Home telecare systems aim to support effective communications and emergency calls for people living in dependency situation but hardly provide reasoning capabilities to understand what to do in a problematic situation. This paper details the design and implementation of a reasoning platform to foresee or react in a smart way at home situations demanding care support for citizens from informal or remote carers. The system manages intelligent agents, whose behavior is defined and validated by ontologies and rules, to react in the elderly fall episode. A development methodology was adapted to sustain knowledge acquisition process from experts and to create the ontology for reasoning logic at homecare scenario. Thus, the platform is easily customizable to acquire data from telecare sensor networks, make reasoning according to each user profile and trigger ad hoc actions to communicate the problematic situation, to whom corresponds, or to interact with home appliances and residential gateways. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.