A structured approach for the designing of safe AAL applications

(Context:) Cognitive diseases such as Alzheimers affect millions of people around the world. One common characteristic of such diseases is that the patient may assume irrational behaviors, which may result in damage to property or, much worse, in injury to family members or to the patient him/herself. (Objective:) These kinds of behaviors must be monitored via intelligent systems in order to guarantee the safety of the patients. (Problem:) They are characterized by their unpredictable and irrational nature which makes the development of monitoring software complex, this being the main challenge that must be faced. (Proposal:) In order to address this issue, our paper presents a structured approach to address the modeling and development of intelligent Ambient Assisted Living Systems for the monitoring of the behaviors of cognitively impaired people. The main impact of our contribution concerns both the automatic identification of irrational behaviors and a methodology for the design of safe AAL applications specifically targeted at users with cognitive or mental diseases. To prove the feasibility of our approach, we show a use case scenario in which we apply our solution to model a monitoring system able to recognize anomalous situations. (Results:) The preliminary results have shown that the application of the proposed process allows developers to improve the safety of the patient in a domestic environment.