Collaborative Research: CSR---EHS: An Open, Dependable and Evolvable Software Infrastructure for Assisted Living

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

The aging of baby boomers has become a social and economical challenge. With an expected doubling of the number of US residents over age 65,(from 35 million in 2000 to 70 million in 2030) and the growth of US expenditures for health-care (projected by some sources to reach 15.9% of GDP by 2010), the cost of senior care is a critical issue for society and for the future of Social Security and Medicare programs. This project aims to design, implement, and evaluate infrastructure technologies to support assisted living, emphasizing: (i) software infrastructure that allows disparate technologies, software components, and wireless devices of different protocol families to work together in a low cost, dependable, and secure fashion with predictable properties; (ii) an interface that adapts this software infrastructure for technology-naive users and incorporates social translucency to provide user-controlled privacy. To achieve the goal, the project seeks to develop the followings: (1) dependable, robust, plug-and-play infrastructure that coordinates sensing, localization, communication, and event/data management, (2) Quality-of-service annotation and analysis technologies that make assumptions explicit and machine checkable for COTS component interfaces, (3) role-based access control and workflow modeling techniques for a rigorous security and privacy framework, (4) QoS manager that handles the surges of workload and adjusts QoS settings of difference services, (5) interference mitigation techniques that allows various wireless devices and protocol stacks co-exist harmoniously sharing the unlicensed frequency band, and (6) a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) component that addresses how directed and ambient information, reminders and alerts should be presented to users and to what extent users can control the degree of information disclosure.