A context-aware component for identifying risks associated to elders' activities of daily living

As elders age, performing everyday tasks can be filled with risks that threaten their health and independence. We present a context-aware component based on agents that enables developers to build Ambient Intelligence Systems for supporting the independent living of elders. This component uses the ELDeR ontology that we propose to model the context information inherent to the elder's daily activities and that enables agents to infer risks. Our aim is to provide a context-aware component flexible enough to easily enable developers to change the contextual conditions for inferring risks in order to respond to a different scenario. In this paper, we describe the component functionality and illustrate its use by presenting the design of a sample application.