Towards Building Virtual Community for Ambient Assisted Living

Elder people are becoming a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. This paper proposes a design to construct a virtual ambient assisted living community where dwellers make contributions to the community so as to best utilize resources and minimize costs. We use service oriented architecture (SOA) to orchestrate the available resources inside the community, thus bringing social intelligence to the social computing. We also propose building such a virtual community making use of virtual reality and in the form of serious game. Daily activities and instruments (such as sensors, cameras, etc.) in real-life may be translated into their virtual community equivalents, and activities happening in the virtual world will trigger corresponding actions in the real world, so that inter-reality may be obtained through this virtual community. We expect such a virtual community could help not only efficiently utilizing the social resources in maintaining the independent living of the elderly people, but also helping these people maintain their connections to the society and bring them entertainment, so that the quality of their living standard may be improved at the same time.