TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY-BASED CUSTOMIZATION APPROACH FOR SUPPORTING PEOPLE WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

Abstract

People with disabilities encounter serious limitations in interacting with their home environment since their requirements are not met properly. Personal assisting devices interacting with the services offered by smart home environments can help to improve the quality of their lives. A major prerequisite for this is to provide an appropriate customization architecture which allows to reason about the person’s current situation in terms of personal, technical and natural context and to adapt the home environment’s services accordingly. This paper proposes a customization approach based on an ontology which comprehensively represents the situation of persons with special needs for the purpose of adapting their home environment’s services. 1