A Service-oriented Infrastructure Approach for Mutual Assistance Communities

Abstract: Elder people are becoming a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. This paper proposes a service-oriented infrastructure approach to this problem. We propose an open and integrated service infrastructure to orchestrate the available resources (smart devices, professional carers, informal carers) to help elder or disabled people. Main characteristic of our design is the explicitly support of dynamically available service providers such as informal carers. By modeling the service description as Semantic Web Services, the service request can automatically be discovered, reasoned about and mapped onto the pool of heterogeneous service providers. We expect our approach to be able to efficiently utilize the available service resources, enrich the service options, and best match the requirements of the requesters.