Situation Aware Cognitive Assistance in Smart Homes

Smart Homes (SH) have emerged as a realistically viable solution capable of providing technology-driven assistive living for the elderly and disabled. Nevertheless, it still remains a challenge to provide situation-aware cognitive assistance for those in need in their Activity of Daily Living (ADL). This paper introduces a systematic approach to providing situation-aware ADL assistances in a smart home environment. The approach makes use of semantic technologies for sensor data modeling, fusion and management, thus creating machine understandable and processable situational data. It exploits intelligent agents for interpreting and reasoning semantic situational (meta)data to enhance situation-aware decision support for cognitive assistance. We analyze the nature and issues of SH-based healthcare for cognitively deficient inhabitants. We discuss the ways in which semantic technologies enhance situation comprehension. We describe a cognitive agent for realizing high-level cognitive capabilities such as prediction and explanation. We outline the implementation of a prototype assistive system and illustrate the proposed approach through simulated and real-time ADL assistance scenarios in the context of situation aware assistive living.