A Domain-Specific Approach To Unifying The Many Dimensions of Context-Aware Home Service Development

The complete proceedings are available at http://www.smart-world.org/2018/uic/conferenceProceedings.phpInternational audienceDeveloping context-aware homes involves a range of stakeholders, addressing many dimensions such as service design and development, infrastructure deployment, and maintenance. Such a variety of dimensions often translate into heterogeneous, low-level, silo-based processing of sensor data to extract context information. This paper analyzes a range of existing data processing layers in the domain of aging in place to identify key concepts and operations specific to context-aware processing. Based on this analysis, we introduce a context-aware, domain-specific language and its software architecture, which allow to put in synergy the stakeholders of a context-aware home by providing them with a unified approach to designing and developing services. Our approach offers context aware-specific abstractions and notations, within a data-centric and data-driven paradigm. We have validated our approach by applying it to an assisted living platform for aging in place, deployed in the home of 129 users. In particular, we used our domain-specific language to re-implement 53 existing services, originating from the stakeholders of the assisted living platform. These services were deployed and successfully tested for their effectiveness in performing the specific tasks of the stakeholders, such as detection of daily activities, user risk situations, or sensor failures