Technology
The technological challenge to provide systems for senior citizens that could foster the different facets of life quality perception demand system architectures for applications and services that overcome the isolated applications of the past.
In order to face the challenge to develop a system architecture that assures the interoperability of services and applications and that can be easily adopted to the requirements of each specific user as well as to the given application scenario, the technological work in PERSONA has been based on analyzing four categories of AAL Services: a) Social Integration; b) Daily Life Support; c) Feel safe and protected; and d) Mobility. The idea is was to identify common functional components, data work flows and communication patterns of applications and services.
PERSONA has two main technological objectives: on one hand, the provision of an open and scalable technological platform; on the other hand, the development and prototyping of AAL Services on the top of the envisioned platform.
A external third party that wants to use PERSONA results to create new AAL Services will use this platform in order to implement software components that use some of its basic functionalities and hardware components that create the infrastructure of an AAL Space. The following should help to understand the idea in more detail:
- A compact piece of software (the PERSONA middleware) should enable the producers of diverse networking-enabled components, such as sensors and controllable gadgets and appliances, as well as developers of applications with different levels of complexity, to produce PERSONA-aware'' components that can be plugged into the system dynamically without much effort. Such new components would live in the same environment as the platform components. Two components sharing the same ontology can speak to each other and consume and provide services using the ontological framework of the PERSONA middleware, while the middleware itself remains independent from concrete ontologies.
- The open distributed platform of PERSONA should make the formation of smart environments affordable for all. It should be possible to start with a small core and let the system evolve over time so that people can arrange the system according to their individual needs as they arise.
- From an end user perspective, instead of dealing with several complicated user interfaces of different devices, users should experience an integrated world easy to interact with, based on natural communication. The PERSONA platform offers a UI framework that facilitates not only simple interaction mechanisms (i.e.g. screen based), but also those with the most difficultmore complex combinations of modalities (e.g. speech-based interaction combined with gesture recognition). Developers of the AAL Services can develop their components in a personalized way without any dependency on available I/O infrastructure while the framework decides on the most appropriate modality and layout based on the user situation and preferences.
- Restricted hardware components in the market, such as small sensor and controller nodes, provide their services have severalusing different protocols and data formats (standard / proprietary, public / private, ...). Additional effort is needed for making such components pluggable into a PERSONA-based system. To reduce the overhead, standard interconnection and adaptation mechanism, called SAIL, has been specified. SAIL additionally provides reusable modules, e.g. for handling communication over ZigBee and for exchanging data in compliance with ZigBee profiles.
- PERSONA is a context-aware system. This means that there are some platform components that manage basic information gathered from sensors and other information sources, such as cameras and agenda of the user, and create a representation of the context of the person. Any software component in the platform can subscribe to context events in order to use this information to provide a better user experience and offer personalized services to the user in a proactive way.
- Finally, the open and distributed nature of the system should lead to more competition on the market promoting the production of not only new components but also improved alternatives for different parts of the existing system, both at the level of application and the platform itself.
PERSONA aims at making a complete evaluation not only of the open platform but also of the impact that the AAL Services cause in the daily life of elderly people and their acceptance and usability. For that reason the AAL Services are being installed in 3 pilot sites: normal households in San Vicente (Alicante, SPAIN), a residence of middle-aged disabled people in Bardi (ITALY) and two residences for elderly people in Odense (DENMARK).
With regard to the platform evaluation several aspects will be evaluated in detail, e.g.: reliability, footprint, network usage, robustness, and efficiency... The final objective is to define a thread of future actions beyond the scope of PERSONA, in order to continue the evolution as a roadmap for further development of this platform and try to spreadfor promoting its use in the research community and why noteventually in real market exploitation scenarios.
