Self-configuring agents for ambient assisted living applications

Ambient assisted living (AAL) is advocated as the technological solution that will enable the elderly population to maintain their independence for a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case. The inherently heterogeneous nature of AmI environments and special requirements of the elderly population pose new challenges for the design and implementation of AAL systems. Thus, the development of these systems demands a context-aware, open, scalable, and distributed software technology that incorporates both intelligent and autonomic reconfiguration techniques. In this contribution, we focus on the design and implementation challenges of an agent-based AAL system that incorporates self-configuring tasks, by means of applying autonomic computing to software agents' internal architecture. We use an agent-based system for tracking elderly people's activity using common commercially available electronic devices as case study. We have validated our approach focusing on response time (a main concern in AAL) using different tests and the results are satisfactory.