Using agent-based modeling and simulation for quality in use evaluation of ambient assisted living applications

Abstract

The Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) paradigm promotes ubiquitous systems that are intended to facilitate different activities for the end user (resident of that environment). This is even more impactful for elderly citizens or people with mobility issues, who tend to face more challenges to perform tasks than someone with no movement problems, as it allows them to age in their own personal space with technological aid. Evaluating the Quality in Use (QinU) of these applications is, therefore, highly necessary. Doing that in a classical way requires involving potential users actively testing the applications in place, which can be difficult for those with some sort of motor impairment. To answer this problem, we propose to evaluate the QinU through simulations using software agents to replace the user’s explicit and implicit interactions with a software application in a simulated AAL. These simulations generate the necessary synthetic data to make a QinU evaluation possible by applying quality measures, therefore providing supporting data for a quality analyst to play their role. A proof of concept is presented as the feasibility study of this proposal.