Toward a Cognitive Middleware for Context-Aware Interaction in Smart Homes

Recent advances in the Internet of things (IoT) have led to renewed interests in the integration of wireless sensors, ubiquitous connectivity, and ambient intelligence technologies for developing contextually intelligent smart homes for the elderly. While tremendous results have emerged out of these efforts, the question of how to support the elderly to interact meaningfully and intuitively with intelligent devices in an IoT-enabled smart home environment remains underexplored. The different shades of physical and cognitive impairments that come with aging mean that the elderly require a uniquely different personalization approach for engaging with digital technologies. As a result, designing effective models of interaction for smart home applications for the elderly is a challenging task and will require approaches that are based on clearly defined models of context and system software architecture, as well as a systematic application of user-centered design principles. This chapter proposes a cognitive middleware for managing an elderly person’s interaction with intelligent devices in a smart home. A key contribution of the chapter is the introduction of a cognitive mechanism – that learns the habits, lifestyles, and preferences of an elderly person – into the traditional middleware. It provides a homogeneous interface involving interactive context management capabilities for adapting application behaviors to the changing environments and interaction requirements of an elderly person in a smart home.