Sensor fusion-based middleware for assisted living1,2

Abstract

Systems for home automation can make a vital contribution to the wellbeing of individuals requiring moderate amounts of support for day-to-day living. Existing systems suffer both from competing and often closed standards bases and from a message-based architecture that can complicate the development of flexible applications requiring information from disparate sources. We describe a knowledge-based pervasive computing middleware and show how it can be used to provide semantically rich unification over a range of home- and web-based automation systems.