End user context modeling in ambient assisted living

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services provide intelligent and context aware assistance for elderly people in their home environment. Following the vision of an open AAL service marketplace, such an approach has to support all lifecycle phases of an AAL service, starting with its specification and development until its operation within the users smart environment. In AAL the support of a user level context model becomes important. This enables an inhabitant of a smart home to get and give feedback on context without technical expertise and intensive training. At the same time, the context model has to be operational and to support context dependent service adaption and abstraction of the underlying context sensors. This leads to a layered context model for AAL with abstraction levels for different aspects. In this paper we focus on the requirements, the model elements and the concepts of the user interface layer of our approach.