Enabling personalisation of remote elderly assistance

One of the goals of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions is to extend the time that elderly people can live independently in their preferred environments by using ICT technologies for personal healthcare. However, in order to be optimal, remote monitoring services and health-related interventions should be strongly personalised to specific individuals’ requirements, preferences, abilities and motivations, which can vary among the elderly, and even dynamically evolve over time for the same person depending on changing user needs and context-dependent conditions. In this paper we present an End User Development (EUD) tool for the personalisation of context-dependent assistance by non-technical users in the AAL domain. In particular, we have considered applications for remotely monitoring and assisting elderly people at home through sending multimedia messages and reminders, as well as changing the state of various domestic appliances (e.g. lamps, heating system, TV) and devices available in the context surrounding the user. The design and development of the tailoring environment has been carried out in an iterative manner, informed by the feedback that was gathered through empirical evaluations done with older adults and caregivers.