Intelligent Decision Support for Pervasive Home Monitoring and Assisted Living

The current trend of population ageing leads to an increasingly larger population of older adults, who understandabl desire to continue living an independent and fulfilling life in their home and within their communities. While traditionally seen as a societal issue, we are currently at a point where advancement in science and technology enables us to augment human help with ambient assisted living solutions. This paper is the result of research and development undertaken within the framework of a European Union research project targeting the development of a cyber-physical system for assisted living and home monitoring. The system integrates an unobtrusive networkof wireless sensors with server software to provide ambient monitoring, location detection and real-time alerting. The present paper is focused on the system's intelligent software components.The first is a business rules engine that can be configured to send real-time alerts in the case of certain ambient conditions or whe the location of the monitored person shows signification alteration from their usual movement patterns. The second component is a artificial intelligence-based location predictor, used to provide the monitored person's location. Discrepancies between actual an expected location are used by the rule engine to trigger real-time alerts to caregivers.