Towards Proactive Health-Enabling Living Environments : Simulation-Based Study and Research Challenges

Nowadays, information and communication technology (ICT) has become a key driver for future health-enabling and ambient assisted living technologies. These future health-enabling living environments proactively anticipate the inhabitants' needs and adapt their behaviour accordingly. They further continuously monitor the behaviour of the inhabitants and may call in support in suspicious cases. In this article, we present an architectural blueprint for such a proactive living environment and highlight the corresponding challenges for research in the field. Afterwards, we present a simulation as experimental platform for learning the daily routine of inhabitants of a flat-sharing community of senior citizens. The experimental evaluation highlights that probably unusual behaviour of persons can be detected using a probabilistic approach, which may serve as an indicator for external support