Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments 2 (2010) 49–66 49 DOI 10.3233/AIS-2010-0052 IOS Press Support for context-aware monitoring in home healthcare Alessandra Mileo, Davide Merico ∗ and Roberto Bisiani Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication, NOMADIS Research Lab., University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy, E-mail: {alessandra.mileo,davide.merico,roberto.bisiani}@nomadis.unimib.it Abstract. This paper tackles the problem of supporting independent living and well-being for people that live in their homes and have no critical chronic condition. The paper assumes the presence of a monitoring system equipped with a pervasive sensor network and a non-monotonic reasoning engine. The rich set of sensors that can be used for monitoring in home environments and their sheer number make it quite complex to provide a correct interpretation of collected data for a particular patient. For this reason, we introduce a logic-based context model for situation assessment combined with high level declarative feedback policy specification, and we use logic programming techniques to reason about different pieces of knowledge for prevention. Keywords: Independent Living, non-monotonic reasoning, knowledge representation, wireless sensor networks, situation assessment 1. Introduction Over the last fifteen years, numerous efforts have been made to create IT-based support systems for the elderly. The main objective of these systems was to help elderly people live a safe life while keeping their independence as long as possible. There are many dif- ferent ways in which such systems have offered sup- port for independent life: for example tele-monitoring chronic pathologies, recognizing activities-of-daily- living and supporting their correct execution, remind- ing the execution of important activities, jogging mem- ory with exercises, helping movements with robotic assistants, and so on. All these different technological supports should cooperate for one main purpose: pro- longing Healthy Life Years. A support system should strive for people to live longer but not in a state in which chronic conditions substantially cripple the quality of life and the capability of living a productive life. Therefore, we think one should stress cognitive support as a way of improving all sides of life from the use of memory to the capability of avoiding falls. * Corresponding author. An Independent-Living System (ILS) should be able to (i) gather information about the world through sen- sors, (ii) translate sensor data to map them into a con- sistent assessment of the real situation, (iii) reason about available knowledge to support the patient’s well being, (iv) perform actions and give feedback to the pa- tient according to the results of the reasoning process, (v) capture reactions to feedback in order to adapt the behavior of the system. We believe that one of the most useful goals should be to prevent situations that can cause drastic changes for the worse of the quality of living, such as falls and substantial weight loss. Rather than supporting activities [12,13] and observing behaviors [15,39], this paper considers a complementary view of artifi- cial intelligence applied to home healthcare. In our view, expressive knowledge representation and rea- soning techniques should be used to (i) understand health evolution identifying risky states in a context- aware fashion and (ii) give clinical, behavioral or environment-related feedback. This can be done by ap- plying automated reasoning to a combination of dif- ferent pieces of knowledge (common-sense, medical, context-dependent), rather than dealing with prede- fined plans and goals to be achieved. 1876-1364/10/$27.50 c  2010 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved