Context Awareness for Pervasive Assistive Environment

Abstract

This chapter will describe our experience concerning a model-based method for environment design in the field of smart homes dedicated to people with disabilities. An overview of related and similar works and domains will be presented in regards to our approach: adaptive user interface according to environment impact. This approach introduces two constraints in a context aware environment: the control of different types of assistive devices (environmental control system) and the presence of the user with disabilities (user profile). We have designed a service-oriented approach to make it easier the management of services life cycle, and we are designing a semantic specification language based on XML to allow dynamic generation of user interface and environment representation. With the new design of context representation, context framework, and context rule specification, we will demonstrate how changes in contexts adapts supervisor task model which in turn configure the whole system. This chapter is dedicated to researchers having strong interest in developing context aware applications based on existing framework. The application to assistive technology for dependant people is the most suitable since the demand of such pervasive environment is clearly identified.