AAL middleware infrastructure for green bed activity monitoring

This paper describes a service oriented middleware platform for Ambient Assisted Living and its use in two different bed activity services: bedsore prevention and sleeping monitoring. A detailed description of the middleware platform, its elements and interfaces, as well as a service that is able to classify some typical user's positions in the bed are presented. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are supposed to be widely deployed in indoor settings and on people's bodies in tomorrow's pervasive computing environments. The key idea of this work is to leverage their presence by collecting the Received Signal Strength (RSS) measured among fixed general purpose wireless sensor devices, deployed in the environment, and a wearable one. The RSS measurements are used to classify a set of user's positions in the bed, monitoring the activities of the user, and thus supporting the bedsores and the sleep monitoring issues. Moreover, the proposed services are able to decrease the energy consumption by exploiting the context information coming from the proposed middleware.