FOGAAL: A Domain-Specific Language for Fog Computing in Ambient Assisted Living Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized numerous sectors, with healthcare being a prominent beneficiary. One key area of advancement is Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), which leverages Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) like IoT to improve the quality of life for vulnerable populations, particularly seniors. However, despite efforts to tailor solutions to the needs of these environments, the prevailing approach often becomes overly focused on intricate implementation details rather than the core characteristics of the problem domain. This narrow focus inhibits generalization and leads to unsustainable solutions due to these environments’ diverse, dynamic, and scalable nature. In response, emerging technology paradigms, such as Fog Computing (FC), have emerged to enhance performance and other quality aspects. FC enables the deployment of distributed, latency-aware applications and services. Therefore, this paper introduces FOGAAL, a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) tool crafted to design AAL architectures, including the FC advantages. To demonstrate FOGAAL’s practical applicability, this contribution uses FOGAAL to build an AAL architecture for a real scenario; in addition, it has an empirical evaluation employing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to gauge user perceptions while utilizing the tool for modeling AAL Architectures. The evaluation, conducted as a quasi-experiment, underscore the tool’s alignment with requirements and its potential for adoption, as evidenced by software engineers who have expressed their intention to use FOGAAL when creating architecture for AAL environments.