A design process enabling adaptation in pervasive heterogeneous contexts

In the next decades, the growth in population aging will cause important problems to most industrialized countries. To tackle this issue, Ambient Assistive Living (AAL) systems can reinforce the well-being of elderly people, by providing emergency, autonomy enhancement, and comfort services. These services will postpone the need of a medicalized environment and will allow the elderly to stay longer at home. However, each elderly has specific needs and a deployment environment of such services is likely unique. Furthermore, the needs evolve over time, and so does the deployment environment of the system. In this paper, we propose the use of a model-based development method, the adaptive medium approach, to enable dynamic adaptation of AAL systems. We also propose improvements to make it more suited to the AAL domain, such as considering heterogeneity and a composition model. The paper includes an evaluation of the prototype implementing the approach, and a comparison with related work.