Supporting active aging through a home automation infrastructure for social internet of things

The number of smart devices inside the living environments grows more and more every day, and with it the need to interface them in order to share data and activate functions. Each day, new scenarios and new applications emerge to make our lives easier in many different contexts. The AAL SOCIALIZE project aims to create a new reference platform for active ageing by applying technological solutions to care for the health of the elderly, facilitate their daily activities, simplify their access to dedicated services. The work presented herein describes the "Elderly Monitoring service" ‒ an IoT module of the SOCIALIZE platform, whose aim is to monitor elderly people's activities and physiological parameters and to combine smart device functions. This modeling process can actively contribute to anticipating, and thereby preventing, emergency situations, increasing elderly autonomy and making them feel "protected" and "safe". In this regard, the system implements a practicable, scalable solution that allows heterogeneous devices belonging to different domotic systems using diverse protocols to interact with each other, share data and services and bind together through ‘friendship’, thereby creating an infrastructure suitable for the creation of a true Social IoT (SIoT).