Simulation-driven platform for Edge-based AAL systems

The ever-growing aging of the population has emphasized the importance of in-home AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) services for monitoring and improving its well-being and health, especially in the context of care facilities (retirement villages, clinics, senior neighborhood, etc). The paper proposes a novel simulation-driven platform named E-ALPHA (Edge-based Assisted Living Platform for Home cAre) which supports both Edge and Cloud Computing paradigm to develop innovative AAL services in scenarios of different scales. E-ALPHA flexibly combines Edge, Cloud or Edge/Cloud deployments, supports different communication protocols, and fosters the interoperability with other IoT platforms. Moreover, the simulation-based design helps in preliminary assessing (i) the expected performance of the service to be deployed according to the infrastructural characteristics of each specific small, medium and large scenario; and (ii) the most appropriate applications/platform configuration for a real deployment (kind and number of involved devices, Edge- or Cloud-based deployment, required connectivity type, etc). In this direction, two different use cases modeled according to realistic input (coming from past experience involving real testbed) are shown in order to demonstrate the potentials of the proposed simulation-driven AAL platform.