A Context-Aware Platform for Computer Assisted Healthcare

Recent advances in the domain of Ambient Intelligent(AmI) context-aware applications and the growing success ofAmbient-Assisted Living (AAL) are enabling new classes ofapplications and devices, which present challenging problemsfor designers. Context and location-awareness have been centralissues in AmI research for the last decade. Ambient Intelligentcomputer assisted systems and applications represent extremelycomplex and heterogeneous distributed systems, composed ofhardware and software components therefore the need for anefficient context-aware platform to seamlessly bind thesecomponents together is well recognised. The demand for AALtechnology is driven by a substantial increase in the agingpopulation hence the need for computer assisted healthcareapplications and devices to help people with varying degrees ofcognitive decline in the future becomes imperative. Assistivetechnology can help many of these individuals with tasks thatthey would normally not be able to do and these range from verysimple tools, such as calendar clocks and touch lamps, to hightechsolutions such as satellite navigation systems to locate them.Research shows that existing context-aware platform solutionsneed to evolve if the goal of full ambient context-aware supportis to be provided for use within the computer assisted healthcarefield. The objectives of this study are to consider and design acontext-aware platform using efficient algorithms and ontology’sto reason over the contextual data that will be gatheredincrementally using sensor based technology and maintained ina cloud computing based system. Swarm intelligence andBayesian networks will be considered for their potential toenhance the underlying reasoning and higher level decisionmaking.