universAAL

As the European population ages, more support is needed with fewer hands to cater for their needs. There is a huge market potential for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions, but adoption is limited because they require significant resources for implementation.

To address this, universAAL produced an open platform that provides a standardised approach making it technically feasible and economically viable to develop AAL solutions. The platform was produced by a mixture of new development and consolidation of state-of-the-art results from existing initiatives. We recognised that this not only poses technical challenges but also raises issues of adoption and uptake. So work on establishing and running a sustainable community was given attention right from the start, with promotion of existing results gradually evolving into promotion of the universAAL platform, as it develops into one consolidated, validated and standardised European open AAL platform.

The universAAL platform provides runtime support for the execution of AAL applications in accordance with a reference architecture, development support through core AAL services and an online developer depot of various development resources. It provides community support, including an online uStore providing a one-stop-shop for AAL services and other resources. The general public can browse the uStore to find what they need; developers use it as the one marketplace where they make their services available.

The consortium was built of major industrial and research players in the field, including key participants from earlier projects. universAAL results were standardised in European (CEN) and international (OMG, Continua) standardisation bodies. We also worked to build a community of European industry interested in keeping the universAAL platform alive after project completion. The project duration was 48 months with an overall budget of 13.9 M euro and a requested grant of 10.5 M euro.

University of Siegen contributed to the definition of the AAL architecture as well as the implementation and experimental evaluation of the universAAL platform. A specific focus of University of Siegen were services for reliability and fault-tolerance in AAL architectures. For this purpose, active redundancy was introduced and the universAAL platform was mapped to Time-Triggered Ethernet. Fault injection experiments were used to evaluate the reliability of the universAAL platform.