Agent Based Simulation for Creating Ambient Assisted Living Solutions Pablo Campillo-Sanchez, Jorge J. G´omez-Sanz Departamento de Ingenier´ıa del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Facultad de Inform´ atica Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain. pabcampi,
[email protected]
Abstract. This demo shows how the development of Ambient Assisted Living systems can be enhanced with the assistance of agent technology. Concretely, this demo introduces advances in the PHAT framework to create what we call Virtual Living Labs. This Virtual Living Lab reproduces realistic conditions of an application working inside embedded hardware that can run Android OS. The concrete situations to reproduce are captured using SociAALML, a modeling language that is being tested in the context of Parkinson’s patients. This information is later on processed to create scenarios in the Virtual Living Lab. Keywords: Agent-oriented software engineering, assisted living, modeling, multi-agent system, ontology, Parkinson’s disease.
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Introduction
An Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications is a system that increases the quality of living of elderly by assisting them. The development of AAL system for specific collectives, like Parkinson, is reduced. Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is an illness with a high impact in the elderly. Parkinson’s patients (PPs) have problems controlling movements, and this is hard to compensate. However, some improvement can be made, like providing stimulus to the patient when they remain still and unable to continue moving. Readers can find a more detailed description of PD and some ideas for improvement in our previous analysis [1]. In the project SociAAL1 , we work under the hypothesis that we could produce more affordable AAL applications for PPs if we had an account of the needs of these patients, and if we could test the intended AAL system in a less expensive way. This approach would save costs firstly because it would tell developers what functionalities are actually demanded, reducing the risks of developing the wrong system; and secondly, because the kind AAL development we pursue requires using a real Living Lab, which are expensive. A Living Lab is a room or a house where the AAL system is deployed and subject of evaluation. 1
SociAAL website: http://grasia.fdi.ucm.es/sociaal
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In this demo, we elaborate on how SociAAL develops solutions in both directions using concepts and technology borrowed from agent research. Agent research provides useful concepts for capturing behavioral information of PPs. Also, this information is realised later on through Multi-Agent Based Simulations, usin MASON platform, that capture the daily living of the patients and permits to validate AAL systems. Our contribution in this demo is twofold. First, we present SociAALML, a domain specific modeling language for capturing activities of the daily living of PPs. This language is introduced in section2. Second, we introduce the concept of Virtual Living Lab with our current implementation of PHAT [2]. A Virtual Living Lab aims to provide early testing for developers that permits to reduce the amount of time invested in the real, and expensive, Living Lab. This concept is more properly presented in section 3.
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SociAALML, a modeling language based on social principles
SociAALML is a modeling language for capturing requirements related to daily situations that PD patients meet. The language is built using INGENME 2 metamodeling framework and is being tested against a collection of interviews made in a field study. In the 2, there is a brief declaration of one patient in one of the interviews. Each patient has a profile that serves to characterize their capabilities and how the disease is affecting them. This is captured with the ParkinsonProfile element. Other elements affecting the behavior of the patient is the social profile, which refers to the influences of the people around the patient, the culture, and the society itself. Other different diseases may appear and condition the behavior of the patient, like the blood return disease. These aspects do condition the daily activities of the patient, which are captured by the ADL Profile. The language permits also to characterize how each daily activity is affected by the specific symptom. The idea is to collect a library of ADL (Activities of Daily Living) and reuse them along the different kinds of actors. Also, we would accumulate symptoms and reuse them directly, or combining them. Once properly defined, these models are processed to generate documentation, but also to parameterize the Virtual Living Lab which will be introduced in the next section.
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PHAT, a virtual living lab concept
The Virtual Living Lab, to be credible, needs to immerse AAL applications completely in the virtual environment. PHAT [2] is a framework that produces 3D simulations representing the outcome of the interaction between an AAL system and some virtual characters. Using a physics engine, PHAT can simulate different collision between objects producing new situations a developer may not 2
http://ingenme.sf.net
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Fig. 1. An excerpt of patient case study using SociAALML
have expected. As an excerpt of what we can do, the environment permits to reproduce effects like sound atenuation due to the distance or having a camera too close to a wall to show anything. The behavior of the actors is implemented using MaSON platform. To facilitate MaSON programming, we provide with abstractions of 3D elements that can be used in the MaSON coding. In a PHAT scenario, the developer identifies actors and their particularities. Since SociAAL is about Parkinson patients, PHAT includes some disease specific features that aims to capture what we have found in the field studies. As section 2 has introduced, actors can have regular activities which are conditioned by the conditions of the patient. In the case of figure 2, the patient shows shaking moves which may appear in some cases. These moves are a challenge, for instance, if you intend to identify when the patient has fallen. The relative, in the same case study, is in the kitchen preparing diner. In this scenario, the quality of the relative is increased because there is a monitoring system, represented by the three abovementioned devices, that permits the relative to pay less attention to the patient. In the case of the patient, it increases the autonomy because it is not necessary to have the relative watching everytime. With this purpose in mind, a developer would have to produce the necessary software that would run into the different parts of this monitoring system. PHAT allows to integrate virtual devices in the environment with full sensory integration. These devices are supposed to run Android OS (any version), like many of the current smartphones available today, though Android OS is capable of running into other hardware. There is actual support to embed Android in other typical smart home hardware in the Android developer site. We use official Android emulators for each device. This facilitates the portability of developed apps to the target platform. These apps hace access to the sensory elements of the device and would be able to generate instructions for other elements, like triggering alarms or switching on Smart TVs. In figure 2, there are three devices: one attached to the hand of the patient, another to the hand of his relative, and a third attached to the bathroom. The relative and patient’s devices have a camera that is active anytime. The device of the bathroom has a microphone that is listening to nearby sounds. The integration of devices and environment is rather complete. The environment feeds the devices with accelerometer information, image streams, sounds (including atenuation due to the distance of the source of sound), even user input. The later is a feature under development that our virtual characters use to interact with the devices.
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Fig. 2. A running instance of PHAT showing a Parkinson disease patient and a relative
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Conclusions and future work
Using agent research results, we are creating a modeling language and an agent based platform to aid us building our Virtual Living Lab concept. Both elements are being applied to rethink how Ambient Assisted Living systems are developed. The final goal is to reduce the costs of producing applications for Parkinson patients, though these principles can be applied to people in different situations. Acknowledgements This work has been done in the context of the project Social Ambient Assisting Living - Methods (SociAAL), supported by Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness, with grant TIN2011-28335-C02-01.
References 1. M. Arroyo, L. Finkel, and J. Gomez-Sanz. Requirements for an intelligent ambient assisted living application for parkinson patients. In Highlights on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, volume 365 of Communications in Computer and Information Science, pages 441–452. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013. 2. P. Campillo-Sanchez, J. J. G´ omez-Sanz, and J. A. Bot´ıa. Phat: Physical human activity tester. In J.-S. Pan, M. M. Polycarpou, M. Wozniak, A. C. P. L. F. Carvalho, H. Quinti´ an-Pardo, and E. Corchado, editors, HAIS, volume 8073 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 41–50. Springer, 2013.
