GoAAL: an Ontology for Goal-oriented Development of AAL Environments

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems are playing an important role in the modern society, by helping elderly people to live more independently and support daily activities. Knowledge models have been proposed in the past to describe AAL devices. However, models and methodologies capable to provide assistance to system designers during the development of an AAL environment are still missing. To this aim, in this work we propose an ontology to formally represents all relevant knowledge in the AAL domain ranging from goals to measures and sensors. On its top, a set of logic-based reasoning functions provides advanced support to the development process. In this way, starting from high-level goals the designer can easily retrieve which devices are needed to best meet the project specifications, leading to a cost-effective reduction of development time.