AALUMO: a user model ontology for ambient assisted living services supported in next-generation networks

Abstract

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services are emerging as context-awareness solutions to support elderly people?s autonomy. The context-aware paradigm makes applications more user-adaptive. In this way, context and user models expressed in ontologies are employed by applications to describe user and environment characteristics. The rapid advance of technology allows creating context server to relieve applications of context reasoning techniques. Specifically, the Next Generation Networks (NGN) provides by means of the presence service a framework to manage the current user's state as well as the user's profile information extracted from Internet and mobile context. This paper propose a user modeling ontology for AAL services which can be deployed in a NGN environment with the aim at adapting their functionalities to the elderly's context information and state.