CASanDRA: A framework to provide Context Acquisition Services ANd Reasoning Algorithms for Ambient Intelligence Applications

Abstract

The development of ambient intelligence (AmI) applications usually implies dealing with complex sensor access and context reasoning tasks, which may significantly slow down the application development cycle when vertically assumed. To face this issue, we present CASanDRA, a middleware which provides easily consumable context information about a given user and his environment, retrieving and fusing data from personal mobile devices and external sensors. The framework is built following a layered service oriented approach. The output data from every CASanDRA's layer are fully accessible through semantic interfaces; this allows AmI applications to retrieve raw context features, aggregated context data and complex `images of context', depending on their information needs. Moreover, different query modes -subscription, event-based, continuous and on-demand- are available. The current `mobile-assisted' version of CASanDRA is composed by a CASanDRA Server, developed on an applications container and hosting the system intelligence, and CASanDRA Lite, a mobile client bundling a set of sensor level acquisition services. How an AmI application may be effortlessly built on CASanDRA is described in the paper through the design of an `Ambient Home Care Monitor'.