A middleware for intelligent environments in ambient assisted living

The increasing elderly population is changing the demography of many countries, becoming a major issue for society. As a direct consequence of this demographic phenomenon, allied to technological developments and pressure to reduce healthcare costs, new healthcare technologies for proactive health and elder care is needed. However, interoperability issues among different levels of available technologies restricts a wider deployment among intermediate and end-users. This work presents a service-oriented middleware that was developed to provide access to the functionality offered by virtually any existing device, or application, in a residential setting, in a transparent and intuitive form. The proposed middleware abstracts the communication technologies involved, allowing to seemingly integrate different communication protocols, making possible the distributed cooperation of devices that were built as stand-alone products. As a test case, an application was built with the middleware to monitor blood pressure and electromyography signal using typical health devices.