Ability Profiling Toolkit using Ambient Dynamix

The research topic of the working group Ambient Computing at the Institute of Telematics is the development of interactive, context-aware ubiquitous systems. A major application area is the so called Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), which focus on age appropriate assistive technologies as solutions for the challenges imposed by the ageing societies and the demands for an autonomous living at age.

In the last years, the number of people participating in ambient assisted living (AAL) systems increased a lot. Due to demographic change, the population of elderly people keeps raising1. Currently, the average age is 42,8 and 45,5 years for men and women respectively2 in Germany. The government is investing millions of Euros in research for AAL and selfdetermined living3. Likewise, the number of smartphone users and small embedded systems is raising. In order to attend to user needs and preferences, mobile applications are increasingly becoming contextaware and personalized. In this thesis, a toolkit for profiling physical ability and disability profiling will be designed and implemented. The toolkit will be based on the Ambient Dynamix4 (Dynamix) open source context modeling framework.

This project will be based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF5 6 ) for a common and opensource definition of the disabilities. The ICF is one of the most widely used classification of health and healthrelated domains. The ICF provides information about the functioning and disability of individuals, environmental factors, and describes and measure health and disability.

The toolkit aims at creating personalized ability profiles, based on the richcontext information of the physical state and the ambient context of the user. The context information provided by the toolkit can be used by applications to infer information about the physical status and abilities of the user in order to adapt accordingly to the user needs.

The main contributions of this project are:

• Designing and implementing a generic Dynamix ability plugin for aggregating physical assessment information.
• Design a generic Dynamix plugin for delivering ability profiles for applications.
• Designing and implementing an ability manager application/service. This manager should allow the user to manage her information and to control the access on physical profiles.
• Demonstrate the output of the project in a running demonstration.

 Skills in Java programming under the Eclipse Platform. This work will engage the student in a number of interesting technical challenges by working with modular software design, XML modelling and parsing, etc. Design experiences for a simple and intuitive GUI would be ideal but are not mandatory. Supervision is organized in English. Therefore, the thesis should be performed in English as well. The software will be published under an open source license scheme.

After introduction into the topic and implementation of the required tasks, a solid documentation has to be performed. The implemented code has to be completely commented and will be released under the Apache Open Source License. The rules for Writing Scientific Theses at the institute have to be followed.

1. http://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/zahlenundfakten/sozialesituationindeutschland/147368/themengrafikdemografischerwandel

2. http://www.bibdemografie.de/DE/ZahlenundFakten/02/Abbildungen/a_02_15_durchschnittsalter_d_ab1871.html

3. http://www.mtidw.de/ueberblickbekanntmachungen

4. http://ambientdynamix.org/

5. http://www.who.int/classifications/icf/icf_more/en/

6. http://www.disabilitaincifre.it/documenti/ICF_18.pdf