Framework-Oriented Approach to Ease the Development of Ambient Assisted-Living Systems

Ambient assisted-living (AAL) systems, including wearables and home automation, could improve the quality of life of fragile people. As analyzed in this paper, the typical architecture of AAL systems is based on wireless sensors networks and proprietary gateways and it can be complex, expensive, and hardly includes interoperable multivendor devices. Emerging Android-based gateways can help in reducing costs, but flexibility and interoperability issues will still remain. On the basis of this fact, the development of an AAL system by a framework-oriented approach is presented. Thanks to the use of the SAndroidE framework, the proposed approach leads to the reduction of the programming effort as well as improves interoperability among different vendors ensuring high customization levels. Results obtained in a typical use case indicate that the programming effort in integrating multivendor devices is reduced by a factor of ten. The presented approach paves the way to the implementation of new open multivendor AAL systems, also encouraging redundant architectures and improving robustness of these emerging solutions.