A heterogeneous sensors integration platform for independent living spaces

Continual advances in modern technologies make it feasible to build intelligent independent living spaces for the elderly and disabled. In the past few years, various sensors and medical devices have been commercially available for home healthcare applications, but still there is a lack of effort on integrating heterogeneous commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors from various vendors to collect data and provide more flexibility in product selection for customers. In order to address this issue, this paper presents a heterogeneous sensors integration platform for independent living spaces. The proposed platform, which is based on Apache Thrift, can accomplish the tasks of data collection, organization, and storage through cross-language services. A prototype system has been implemented and integrated into an independent living space monitoring system to validate the proposed approach.