Developing an Ambient Home Care System: Context Toolkit-Based Design and Implementation

Ageing societies raise new social and economic challenges which are expected to be partially solved by the use of advanced technology. Ambient home care systems (AHCS) aims at alleviating both elderly and caregivers daily tasks, thanks to their control of environmental, health and physical sensors and their capability of reasoning on the acquired information. In this paper, we design and develop a prototype of an AHCS using and adapting an open software framework, the context toolkit (CTK). The CTK here is customized to handle our proper acquisition platform. On our work, we infer some conclusions about design practices and context management for AHCS.