The development of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems is a challenging one. It’s is inherently expensive because of, among others, the necessary experi-mentation and availability of hardware, the uncertainty in the determining the necessary functionality which leads to longer development periods, the need of incorporating the end-user in the development so as to have early feedback, and, at the same time, the complexity of preserving the end-user dignity, privacy, and integrity.
By transferring the development work of the AAL solution to the computer, several benefits are achieved. The main one is the cost reduction since the development environment is not a demanding one and computers designed for gaming will be sufficient. A secondary one is the easiness of experimentation, with the capability of running batteries of tests in a deterministic way.
This development philosophy is what we call Virtual Living Lab This transfer has to exist in both directions. It is not only bringing the problem to the computer. It is also being capable of taking out a working solution from the computer. Both transfers are challenging because they imply reproducing the hardware inside the simulation in a convincing way.
Past works focused on the Android platform, which was a limiting decision. This iteration of this solution will open the development environment to linux based platforms with enough sensor/actuator availability.
The demo uses software which now is part of the Ambient Intelligence Development Environment (AIDE), which is distributed as free software from AIDE.