An Implementation Framework for Smart Home Telecare Services

Expected benefits of smart home telecare services do still depend on the capability to develop and validate systems which may foresee or react in an intelligent way to situations demanding specific support to patients, informal carers or authorized staff. Together with wireless sensor networks or broadband communication infrastructures at home, it is needed to create models and methods to solve how a smart home might think and act in identified home care contexts. This research work provides and implementation framework, supported by knowledge based techniques, that permits to design, develop and validate the description logic of a smart home telecare service. The framework includes an adapted methodology to sustain the knowledge acquisition process from users and experts as well as the creation and integration of ontologies in order to facilitate reasoning logic at ad hoc scenarios. The system was validated for a smart home telecare context supporting elderly fall episodes.