Development and evaluation of SOA-based AAL services in real-life environments: A case study and lessons learned
Introduction
The proper use of ICT services can support seniors in living independently longer [1], [2]. While such services are starting to emerge, current proprietary solutions are often expensive, covering only isolated parts of seniors’ needs, and lack support for sharing information between services and between different stakeholders. It is complex and time consuming to develop high quality services, and support is needed to simplify the development and reduce the development costs. By providing a knowledge base of elderly user needs, software development tools and out of the box software components, we can reduce the costs of delivering ICT services to seniors and as such increase the number and quality of services delivered [2].
In the seminal paper about health information systems from 2006 [3], Haux argues that it is necessary to explore new architectural styles that focus on trans-institutional access to patient data. Finally he concludes that: “informatics methodology and technology is expected to facilitate continuous quality of care in aging societies”. The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) [4] architectural style is designed upon the ideas of cross-organizational information sharing and reuse.
This paper reports on the design, development and evaluation of a software platform for building assistive services for elderly users, with special focus on users with cognitive challenges such as mild dementia. The platform builds upon the concepts of SOA, and was developed in the context of the European research project MPOWER1 [5] (October 2006–June 2009). The SOA approach facilitates reuse of domain services between disparate systems and incorporation of domain knowledge into software artefacts, and its flexibility facilitates tailoring and personalization of the systems to the needs of individual users or user groups. The main contributions presented in the paper are:
- 1.
A knowledge base of user needs: The user needs knowledge base was developed through an extensive requirement phase including 143 persons including seniors professional care providers, family, and physicians.
- 2.
Model driven toolchain development: Using a model-driven development toolchain, an architectural description including UML [6] use cases and information models for the target domain was specified.
- 3.
A set of reusable domain specific software services: Based on the identified requirements in the domain, requirements for tool support and reusable services were derived. A set of 25 SOA services were designed and implemented according to the SOA for HL7 methodology [7] and task-centric approach described by Erl [8].
- 4.
Two pilot systems developed using domain software services: To validate the usefulness of the SOA services, one information-sharing and one sensor-centric pilot system were implemented and deployed to real-life settings. The two pilot systems were built on top of the 25 domain services in order to reduce the development effort and time.
Evaluations have been conducted on both technical artefacts (methodology and tools), and on end user experience. Two evaluations were conducted on the developers: the use of model-driven development tools and the use of SOA in application development. The evaluation of end user experience was conducted in the period from February 2008 to June 2009. Five elderly (age 65–92) and their carers (formal and informal) in Norway have used the information-sharing system. The evaluation was conducted in three phases, as reported in [9]. The sensor-centric system was installed in a Polish nursing home and a usability evaluation was done in a three-month period from April to June 2009.
The main technical findings are that a SOA facilitates the development of domain services that may improve the overall system design and performance. However, the reusability of services varies between the functional areas, and this must be taken into account. From an elderly/patient and carer point of view, the pilot systems provided appropriate functionality and reasonable quality of service. For one user of the information-sharing system the activities of daily living were significantly improved.
This paper provides the complete view of the experiences gained in the EU IST project MPOWER with respect to using model-driven development techniques for SOA service and system development in the AAL domain. In so doing, references to already published works are given, and some quotes from their conclusions are presented. In addition to providing this holistic view, important new results on developers’ perceptions of using SOA is provided in Section 4.1. The main referenced works are:
- •
On user needs investigation and service modelling: [9], [10], [11]
- •
On toolchain design and evaluation: [11], [12], [13], [14], [15]
- •
On pilot system evaluation [9], [16]
We conclude that SOA in development of support systems for elderly and their carers (formal and informal) can be beneficial when the services are designed in line with the domain needs and technical environment factors such as network stability are considered carefully. The SOA services are provided as open source in the FREE MPOWER project [17] and are developed further in the EU IST project universAAL.2 Software companies and system integrators could benefit from both our reported experiences and the reusable software services.
The paper is organized as follows: First we present the context in which the work was carried out, along with the overall research questions and the methods applied. Some parts of the work have been published elsewhere and references along with a short summary of the method and results are included to get the complete picture. Then the results are presented in two sections: a technical and an evaluation section. The technical section focuses on the reusable software artefacts whereas the evaluation part reports from both the developer and elderly/patient/carer evaluations. Then a discussion section follows, addressing the core research questions before some concluding remarks are given.
Section snippets
Research questions, context and methods
A core objective of the MPOWER project was to define and implement a platform of reusable software services that could improve the development of novel assistive care applications with respect to time, quality and standards adherence. This paper presents the results from the project, focusing on three questions:
- (1)
How do the developers perceive the use of model-driven development and SOA for application development in the AAL domain?
- (2)
What are the set of reusable SOA software services covering
User needs
The results from the domain user needs investigation are presented according to the main steps in the investigation process.
The recorded material from the questionnaires, workshops and interviews was used to describe the problem and activity scenarios. The developed artefacts from this process are:
- •
18 user scenarios, each with three to four sub-processes were described. These were then subject for analysis by system architects using UML use case modelling.
- •
113 UML use cases were described,
Evaluation results
This section presents results from the evaluations. The first sub-section presents the results from evaluation of the SOA approach on the developers in the project, which is main focus in this paper. The second sub-section gives a summary of the evaluation of the pilot applications.
Discussion
This section discusses the results achieved in terms of the research questions defined in Section 2. Following the discussion of the main questions addressed, a brief discussion on the implications for other system development initiatives in terms of the results presented herein is presented. The final subsection describes the open source project initiated from the project where all service designs and implementations are shared.
Concluding remarks
This paper presents an overview of the core technical results achieved in the MPOWER project. The results cover the complete development process, from requirements elicitation to evaluation of a deployed system in real environments.
The services identified from the user needs have been designed, implemented using a model-driven development toolchain. Both the services and the toolchain are available as open source from the project.
Evaluations showed that developers found it useful to apply
Authors’ contributions
All the authors have contributed directly in the writing of this paper. During the MPOWER project, all of the authors participated in the technical work in architecture and/or implementation. Mikalsen also was the project coordinator, while Walderhaug was technical manager for the MPOWER project.
Conflict of interest
We have not identified any significant conflicts of interest that could affect our results or conclusions.
Acknowledgements
The MPOWER project was funded by the EU under the FP6 IST-2005-2.5.11 e-Inclusion, contract 034707.
We are grateful for all the efforts the MPOWER participants put into the project, and which contributed to producing project results summarized in this paper.
We would in particular like to thank Dr Mariusz Duplaga and Torhild Holthe for their consent to include quotations from the report on the results of the evaluation of the pilot applications. Dr. Duplaga coordinated the evaluation task for the
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