Adaptivity as a Service (AaaS): Personalised Assistive Robotics for Ambient Assisted Living

The need for personalised Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions is widely recognised. However, many existing solutions lack flexibility in terms of long-term user-adaption, a natural effect of working within the constraints of lab-based evaluation. As such, few approaches directly address a potentially desirable heterogeneous future where AAL is accessible to all: people should be able to create solutions that work for them through bricolages of assorted off-the-shelf (OTS) devices, including robots. For AAL to succeed at scale, these devices must share experiences of user interactions within and outwith the home. Adaptivity as a Service (AaaS) sandboxes adaptivity into its own research domain and posits that adaptation should be managed by a highly specialised adaptivity service that ‘fits in’ with different AAL solutions.