Evolutionary and Adaptive Elderly Care Ecosystem

Personalized care services for each individual are typically required in the aging process. Considering this domain, a collaborative elderly care ecosystem (ECE) is proposed to support the provision of composite services that may combine contributions from multiple service providers. A personalized solution is built through of services composition, tailored to the individual customer (senior), respecting her/his requirements, preferences, lifestyle, and constraints. An additional issue the ecosystem must deal with is the problem of evolution, as individual’s care needs are not static over time. Consequently, the care services need to evolve accordingly to keep the elderly’s requirements satisfied. This process of services’ adaptation is challenging since many services can be dependent on each other, and there are various constraints that need to be observed before adaptating and enacting new services. In this paper, we exploit socio-technical aspects of service adaptation in the context of elderly care ecosystems. Starting with a service personalization method previously proposed (SCoPE method), we presented an adaptive and evolutionary system (SEvol) based on the MAPE-K methodology. The SEvol method considers customer’s inputs and suggests evolution plans. In the end, a workflow diagram is presented considering the main processes of ECE demonstrating the roles of the ECE environments and the main stakeholders, according to three stages: preparation, execution and monitoring phase.