Telecare service challenge: Conflict detection

Telecare and telehealth system services can be dynamically configured to collect, analyse, store, and adapt to multimodal data about people as they go about their activities of daily life. These services need to be able to personalise to subjects and adapt to changes in lifestyles, environments and technology. Such dynamic adaptability may be well supported by a low-level rule programming approach; however measures may need to be taken to limit the emergence of conflicts between the distributed rulesets owing to differing programmatic assumptions and unexpected changes. Here, we consider types of conflict that might arise when a variety of care devices are brought together and begin to rely on each others' services. This paper describes a distributed rule-based conflict detection approach for use with heterogeneous mobile and home care devices. We propose methods that make it possible to detect certain forms of rule conflict. To do so, we introduce Event Calculus based logic for writing device rules and an analytical framework for conflict detection.