Active life home: a portal-based home care platform

Assistive devices help elderly persons to live longer in their homes. Unfortunately, the devices on the market are incompatible with each other. Also, integration to higher-level services is an open issue. In this article, we propose a portal-based home care platform that integrates together multiple assistive devices and their online services. The integration is done at three levels: service, information, and device. At the service level, we use portal technology to integrate together Personal Health Record (PHR), external services, and web-based device user interfaces. At the information level, we integrate the different devices and services to the PHR using REST-based web services. At the device level, we use a home automation gateway to connect the different devices to the PHR and portal. We tested the architecture in a living lab environment. The results show that multiple integration levels improve the flexibility of home health care systems.