A sustainable software architecture for home care monitoring applications

Abstract

The Ageing of population is a major concern for Western societies and leads to the development of new solutions to improve home care for elders, in order to delay their admission in specialized institutions (retirement house, healthcare facility and so on). These new solutions can be hardware or software based, and most often rely on home automation (e.g. motion sensors, temperature, light...). These sensors are used to monitor elderly or disabled people in order to detect their activities and the potential accidents that may occur. In this paper, we present a software architecture based on interoperable components for home care solutions. This architecture considers two kinds of components: the data providers, for instance a motion sensor, and the data consumers that process sensor data in order to infer higher level information such as a fall detector. The overall architecture is loosely coupled by design, in order to ease the addition of new sensors and of new functionalities.