A goal-oriented, ontology-based methodology to support the design of AAL environments

One of the most critical issues in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is the design of systems that can evolve to meet the requirements of individuals as their needs and health conditions change. Although much work has been done on home and building automation systems for AAL, often referred to as assistive domotics, there is in fact still a substantial lack of solutions capable to support system designers in the early stage of development of such assistive systems. To this aim, the work contributes to the research on design of assistive domotic systems by presenting an ontology-driven methodology aimed to guide the development process. The novel contributions of the paper include the goal-oriented approach of the methodology, which involves the elicitation and analysis of AAL requirements and their formal representation in an ontology, where high-level goals are described in terms of subgoals and tasks, that are then linked to corresponding measures and devices. Moreover, logic-based reasoning enables more advanced functionalities useful at design time. We present a validation of the methodology showing typical use cases both related to the development from scratch of a domotic system with assistive capabilities starting from a set of high-level user requirements and the redesign of existing implementations according to changed requirements.