A NEED FOR AN INTEROPERABLE OPEN SOURCE MIDDLEWARE FOR AMBIENT ASSISTED LIVING APPLICATIONS A Position Paper

Recent European population projections underlined demographic developments towards an "ageing society". A challenge of the future is "ageing well at home" assisted by technology, while maintaining a high degree of independence, autonomy and dignity. Ambient Assisted Living technologies try to follow this objective by integrating intelligent assistance-systems in people's homes. So in future there will be a high demand on AAL applications which should fulfil different needs of user groups and daily living scenarios. To speed up the development process and to make the applications more adaptive and flexible to special user needs a common middleware with standardised interfaces would be desirable. This should be an open-source middleware, which operates as an interconnection layer to the operating system and as basis for applications and services. Furthermore the implementation of different frameworks and standards is preferable to ensure the interoperability of different systems and overlapping domains in AAL. The open source approach can be essential to initiate a community of different stakeholders and to reuse software components with a common understanding on the implemented standards. The paper shows the need of such an interoperable middleware and gives recommendations of standards and frameworks to follow. The paper explains why the open source approach is a chance to fulfil the mentioned motivations. As a first approach the EU IST FP6 project MPOWER is introduced, which could be the basic fundament of such a middleware approach. It is an example for an open source service oriented platform providing encapsulated AAL and health related services.