Improving Ambient Assisted Living Through Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The longevity of the population is the result of important scientific breakthroughs in recent years. However, living longer with quality, also brings new challenges to governments, and to the society as a whole. One of the most significant consequences will be the increasing pressure on the healthcare services. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems can greatly improve healthcare scalability and reach while keeping the user in their home environment. The work presented in this paper specifies, implements, and validates a smart environment system that aggregates Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The specification includes a reference architecture, composed by three modules, whose tasks are to automate and standardize the collection of data, to relate and give meaning to that data and to learn from it. The system is able to identify daily living activities with different levels of complexity using a temporal logic. It enables a real time response to emergency situations and also a long term analysis of the user daily routine useful to induce healthier lifestyles. The implementation addresses the applications and techniques used in the development of a functional prototype. To demonstrate the system operation three use cases with increasing levels of complexity are proposed and validated. A discussion on related projects is also included, specifically on automation applications, Knowledge Representation (KR) and Machine Learning (ML).