Flexible Homecare Application Personalization and Integration Using Pattern-Based Service Tailoring: Supporting Independent Living of Elderly with IT

In most of the industrialized countries, the aging of the population dramatically progress rapidly. This trend demands economically feasible solutions to provide care to elderly, preferably at their home. IT can play an important enabling role in such solutions. Previously, we proposed an approach for personalizing IT-based homecare services by introducing a tailoring process. The tailoring process allows to create personalized services for elderly with various needs. The outcome of a service tailoring process is a so called service plan, which represents a composite service tailored to the specific needs of a specific elderly (the 'care-receiver') as understood by the person responsible for deciding on the care activities (the 'care-giver'). The service plan is created based on a treatment pattern that corresponds to the homecare task for which automated support is needed. In this paper, we elaborate on the idea of pattern-based service tailoring. First, we briefly introduce the architecture of the tailoring platform and identified common homecare tasks via interview with the care-givers. Then, we zoom in on how we established two important aids for creating a service plan, namely the treatment patterns and the abstractions of devices and applications that can be deployed in the automated support. We give examples of both patterns and abstractions, and discuss how these can be used in creating a tailored service plan.