Cognitive Village is a collaborative project co-funded by the German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF). The project aims at developing an adaptive, learning system for supporting the everyday life of elderly in their homes and neighborhoods, both in urban as well as rural areas. The system will serve as a hub connecting various sensors and actuators via a real-time middleware. A machine learning component will analyze the behavior of the user in order to find patterns and adapt intelligently to his/her routines and individual needs.
Cognitive Village will deliver socio-technical innovation in the field of ambient assisted living and ambient intelligence. A challenge of the project is to identify potentials for support and provide technological compensation for physical decline as well as tools to foster well-being in older age. Based on a deep understanding of the needs of elderly users in different fields, the project will deliver a technical platform for measuring and analyzing user behavior in a wide range of contexts, as well as components for making this data accessible to users in comprehensive ways that allow for self-reflection as well as optimized care.
Cognitive Village aims at supporting elderly users in staying in their homes as long as possible. This requires an open system architecture which especially has to consider the mobility requirements of the elderly people. In order to support medical use cases with strict timing requirements like tele-medicine and -monitoring, the architecture has to provide services for reliability and real-time communication. Referring to this, a big challenge is to provide these services even with respect to the mobility of the elderly people while simultaneously ensuring the openness of the architecture where sensors and applications can enter and leave at run-time. Both situations require a dynamic reconfiguration of communication (and computation) resources in the Cognitive Village network. The design of the architecture includes a Home Gateway device which runs the Cognitive Village middleware and will enable the discovery and peering of local sensors and smart devices. In order to comply with the mobility requirements, we will implement a safe and fault-tolerant communication protocol for the communication among the Home Gateway devices. The protocol will guarantee the forwarding and processing of the sensor data with respect to the mobility of the elderly people.
