GATEWAY ARCHITECTURES FOR HOME CARE APPLICATIONS USING WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Abstract

Home Care Applications and Ambient Assisted Living become increasingly attractive. This is caused as well by market pull, as the number of elderly people grows monotonously in highly-developed countries, as well as by technology push, as technological advances and attractive products pave the way to economically advantageous offerings. However, a significant number of challenges remain for real-life applications. Those include the lack of sufficiently standardized and interoperable solutions and thus, the necessity of gateways for integrated solutions, restrictions of the energy budgets, and scalability of solutions with regard to cost and network size. This paper presents the experience from the inCASA project (Integrated Network for Completely Assisted Senior Citizen’s Autonomy), where architectures for heterogeneous physical and logical communication flow are examined.