AAL Person Centered Environment for Information, Communication and Learning
AAL-PCEICL is a research project which tries to develop assistive systems and technologies to safeguard social relationships and participation for those in need of assistance. The project goals of AAL-PCEICL are assistance in communication, information management and in the establishment of an age-appropriate individual learning environment.
In the research project "Assistive Systems and Technologies to Secure Social Relationships and Participation for People in Need of Assistance", innovative assistive systems and technologies are to be developed to support independent living into old age and to secure social relationships and participation for people in need of assistance.
This subproject is based on the following scenario:
Mr. F. lives alone as a widower on a large Black Forest farm. His two children now live abroad and in a distant city. They can only visit their father very rarely. Medical care in this rural region is becoming increasingly difficult since the last country doctor closed his practice for reasons of age and is unable to find a successor. Since Mr. F. fell on the icy plot of land during one of the long winters and has been disabled ever since, his children have been worried, but are at a loss as to how they can support their father. Mr. F. wants to maintain contact with his children and his social environment, is involved in the local museum of local history and wants to continue indulging in his hobby, model railroading.
Project goals
The PCEICL platform
The PCEICL platform provides the user with services. All of the platform's services can be individually compiled and configured for each person as required. PCEICL is based on a combination of OSGi, agents and cloud technologies and is therefore very flexible, modular and intelligent. The use of OSGi, which is widely used in assistance systems in the AAL sector, means that both existing and new services can be easily integrated into the platform.
A profile is created for each user so that the services offered can be optimally adapted to the needs of the individual person. This profile stores personal information, interests, preferences, abilities and also the state of health of the older person. The data is semantically modeled by an ontology that can be used by the agents to provide the respective services with the required information about the user. In addition, the PCEICL platform uses environmental information as context in order to achieve even better adaptation.
In order to demonstrate the personalisability and context sensitivity of the system, three user scenarios, so-called use cases (information, communication and learning) were developed, evaluated on the basis of a test person survey in collaboration with the Ravensburg-Weingarten University of Applied Sciences and implemented as a prototype. Assistance in obtaining information is achieved through support with everyday tasks in difficult health phases (e.g. after a fall) by automatically organising household help or transport to appointments. The system can also offer the user local events that suit their habits and interests and, if necessary, find a ride to these events.
Communication is facilitated by the fact that the older person only has to tell the system who they want to contact. The platform then automatically selects the channel on which the contact is preferably available at that particular time. The system also has information about the pharmacies on duty, the relevant care services and the user's emergency contacts and can automatically select the right channel here too.
In the third use case, the user is supported with personalised fitness exercises. Exercises are offered to suit the user's state of health, current condition and fitness level.
