A Context-aware, Intelligent and Flexible Ambient Assisted Living Platform Architecture

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions support older people in remaining longer in their own environment. For a system to be successful on the market, it is essential to be flexible and adaptable to the individual needs of the elderly person. In this paper, we present an approach for a context-aware, intelligent and flexible AAL platform architecture, that integrates existing concepts for home automation environments with an extendable platform for information, communication and learning to assist elderly users in their daily life. The platform has the intelligence to react on environmental changes, by including data provided by sensors or external services, as well as changes of the medical state of the user by using a person centered ontology to deliver adapted services at any time. The intelligence to do this is assured by lightweight and autonomous software agents. The custom platform itself is realized as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) in the cloud. The setup is a Private Cloud, that shares central services in the Public Cloud for better flexibility, scalability and maintainability. It features a PaaS management system to customize and preconfigure different environmental settings. The user is able to add new services on demand or adjust the configuration of the platform to his needs.