OpenCare project: An open, flexible and easily extendible infrastructure for pervasive healthcare assisted living solutions

Pervasive healthcare technology is needed to meet the challenges of an aging population in the western world, as well as an expected major shortage of healthcare personnel in the near future. The OpenCare Project is an open source infrastructure framework, designed to be used by researchers and corporate developers for developing experimental assisted living prototypes, as well as a complete feature rich systems with a high degree of flexibility and modifiability. Following a motivating discussion on the problem domain, a survey of related research projects and commercial products, points out the need for an open source infrastructure framework. Finally, the OpenCare Project is presented and the overall design is discussed.