User-driven context aware creation and execution of home care applications

Abstract

In the Internet world, the tags Web 2.0 and user centricity have been used in recent times to reflect the democratization of the Web where end users are no longer passive entities and have assumed a key role in which they create content themselves. The evolution of this paradigm in the Internet has even given birth to tools like Microsoft Popfly or Yahoo Pipes, thanks to which end users with no specific computer skills are able to create their own highly personalized services. In an environment like home care, where each user has very specific individualized needs, the application of this new paradigm seems very promising, and to promote that philosophy porting, this paper presents a system to allow each individual and his/her carers to build, execute, and manage the specific personalized monitoring, comfort, automation, and safety applications required. Additionally, thanks to built-in, context awareness capabilities, the applications created are automatically adapted to the context of the users inside the proposed system, eliminating the need for frequent human–machine interaction which is of the uttermost importance for impaired users.