Building a Context-Aware Ambient Assisted Living Application Using a Self-Adaptive Distributed Model

Abstract

Ambient assisted living (AAL) applications are intended to allow elderly people to stay at home while connected to their family and medical staff. These applications involve several services as health-care services or infotainment, which are executed on different environments such as hospital, proximity doctor, family homes. These environments constitute a distributed, heterogeneous, highly dynamic infrastructure that makes it necessary to build AAL applications as adaptive software including the necessary mechanisms to dynamically modify their behavior. In this paper we propose a multi-level model to build context-aware self-adaptive entities: the basic level defines the mandatory functionalities for adaptive entities, while upper-levels define how to coordinate adaptation of primitive or composite entities. The generic nature of the model is illustrated by its use when building a self-adaptive distributed data management service for an AAL application.