Goal Lifecycles and Ontological Models for Intention Based Assistive Living within Smart Environments

Current ambient assistive living solutions have adopted a traditional sensor-centric approach, involving data analysis and activity recognition to provide assistance to individuals. The reliance on sensors and activity recognition in this approach introduces issues with scalability and ability to model activity variations. This study introduces a novel approach to assistive living which intends to address these issues via a paradigm shift from a sensor centric approach to a goal-oriented one. The goal-oriented approach focuses on identification of user goals in order to pro-actively offer assistance by either pre-defined or dynamically constructed instructions. This paper introduces the architecture of this goal-oriented approach and describes an ontological goal model to serve as its basis. The use of this approach is illustrated in a case study which focuses on assisting a user with activities of daily living.