Managing Home Care Networks

Home care networks are a new development for automated support of care at home. To address the challenges of home care, the paper describes a component-based architecture developed by the MATCH project (mobilising advanced technologies for care at home). Two key components are discussed for managing home care networks. A service registry supports generic and extensible registration of services, components, resources and devices in the home. The registry uses ontologies for semantically-based description and discovery. A policy system automates support of how a home network should deliver care. The views of stakeholders in home care are represented as goals and policies. These are defined in a user-friendly manner and are applied at run-time. Conflicts among goals and policies are automatically detected and resolved.