Rapid prototyping Internet of Things solutions through a model-driven approach: A case study in AAL

The great expansion of the Internet of Things in every aspect of daily life requires expertise and considerable skills in different fields and at different levels to create ad-hoc applications, and deliver suitable user experience. Developers have to deal with heterogeneous technologies, communication formats and protocols. They, in general, ask for new solutions that speed up the prototyping of applications, abstracting the extreme heterogeneity of sensors, actuators and smart objects, which they rely on. To demonstrate how to bridge this gap, here we propose an experience in rapid design and prototyping of an ambient assisted living system that detects the movements of elderly persons in their home, acquiring data through sensors in an unobtrusive way. Our solution is built on top of the WoX (Web of Topics) middleware, a model-driven cloud platform based on the concept of Topic - i.e. an entity containing the value of a feature of interest that we intend to detect - and on its local counterpart, the L-WoX (Local-Web of Topics) that manages local instances of features of interest, allowing mobile applications to collaborate among them, offering and receiving data.