A Design Tool to Reason about Ambient Assisted Living Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a design tool for modeling and analyzing mutual assistance communities in ambient assisted living, demonstrating how internal help can reduce reliance on external medical services.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel design tool to simulate and reason about emergent behaviors in mutual assistance communities for elderly and disabled care.

Findings

Mutual assistance can provide timely care within communities.

Design decisions impact the effectiveness of care delivery.

Communities can reduce dependence on professional medical services.

Abstract

This paper proposes a design tool to investigate the properties and emergent behaviours of a special class of Ambient Assisted Living systems, namely mutual assistance communities where the dwellers contribute to each other's well being. Purpose of our system is to understand how mutual assistance communities work, what consequences a design decision could ultimately bring about, and how to construct care communities providing timely and cost-effective service for elderly and disabled people. We prove that mutual assistance between dwellers can provide care in time, and decrease the requirement for professional medical service. The simulation results show that with the existing rules most of the requirements for help can be solved or promptly initiated inside the community before their members resort to external professionals.