Federation of AAL & AHA systems through semantically interoperable framework

Abstract

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) immensely benefit from IoT application. The federation of IoT platforms can multiply the benefits obtained by the operation of those systems in an isolated way, as it enables important synergies (e.g., intelligent information sharing, system cooperation, service enhancement). This federation requires the enablement of interoperability between the IoT systems, which represents a major challenge, as systems typically follow very different standards, data formats, semantic models and manners of representing the information. We have provided a technical solution in the frame of ACTIVAGE, a project that aims to federate multiple heterogeneous IoT platforms and systems associated to clusters of AHA Smart Homes in 12 regions across Europe, with the goal to improve the AHA service provided and create the first European AHA ecosystem. Our technical solution allows the enablement of full semantic interoperability across heterogeneous platforms and it has been validated in a test scenario. It enables significant AHA service enhancement within the ACTIVAGE ecosystem, as native applications from one platform could be used indistinctly by all federated platforms. Our solution allows good scalability federating new platforms, with linear and relatively low effort.