Generic distributed sensing in support of context awareness in ambient assisted living

Abstract

Researches in ambient assisted living have so far faced three important challenges: (1) Lack of a comprehensive approach to capture user needs that are generic; i.e., not limited to specific events, but as generic related to the user. (2) Lack of a highly flexible and scalable platform for the distributed sharing and processing of context between nodes in IoT networks. (3) Increased amount of communication and devices with sensors participating in the acquisition, processing and sharing of context further challenges both computation capability and storage capacity of the system. In this paper, we address these limitations and present novel support, applied in a system for remote assistance of elderly. The support comprehensively retrieves user needs from generic context, via a scalable overlay providing increment of processing capability and storage. Further, the support self-organizes entities into generic context from distributed sensing, using the Dependent Context Pattern (DCP) based on the Context Virtualizing Platform (CVP).