Context awareness architecture for ambient-assisted living applications: Case study of nighttime wandering

OBJECTIVES: This work presents an ambient-assisted living application that encourages seniors during nocturnal wandering episodes to return to bed in calm and comfort reassurance. METHODS: Structuring knowledge by designing a software architecture capable of delivering high-level analysis and processing. A senior’s home has been upgraded into a smart home enabling the gathering of habits for two weeks and set up for personalized assistance over four weeks. Home automation devices associated with Actigraph monitors and self-reported sleep were used for more accuracy. RESULTS: The architectural model can be used in ambient-assisted living applications for which data collection is permanent and continuous. Its layered organization facilitates the management of specific and general activities of daily life. The results of the home experience show that the system gave a notification whenever the need arose. On the other hand, it allowed the caregiver to get more information about the lifestyle of the senior. CONCLUSIONS: Future work should focus on providing more services to contextualize assistance. Ontology is used to structure all the ambient knowledge of the smart home. We also plan to do more home experiments.