URL: http://www.sisarl.org

The acronym SISARL stands for Sensor Information Systems (Services) for Active Retirees and Assisted Living. It refers broadly to consumer electronic and assistive appliances, as well as services, designed to enrich the quality of life of elderly individuals and to help them live actively and independently. Examples are

• object locators that help us to find household and personal items;
• smart storage pantries that inventory grocery supplies and notify designated suppliers for just-in-time replenishment;
• medicine dispensers that help to ensure correctness and enforce compliance of medication schedules;
• monitors that record and process vital sign signals, detect irregularities, and send appropriate notifications; and
• robotic helpers that enhance dexterity and accessibility and minimize the effects of functional limitations.

The thrusts of our work are on technologies for the design, production, and quality assurance of easy-to-use, dependable SISARL appliances and services with state-of-art and future capabilities. These appliances and services are not only needed to improve the well-being of an increasingly larger segment of the global population, but they also present to the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) industry a tremendous new business opportunity. We want to help the industry to shorten the time and lower the cost required to bring families of high-quality SISARL products and services to market. Problems to be solved include

• how to partition diverse SISARL appliances and services into common components;
• how to configure and integrate the components in a systematic, verifiable way to build diverse appliances and services;
• how to design and implement the appliances for compositional and incremental verification, validation and certification;
• how to make the appliances easily customizable to users¡¦ needs, preferences, and available support infrastructures;
• how to ease the incorporation of future extensions and advancements into existing SISARL;and
• how to effectively exploit application/platform co-design, software/hardware co-design and SoC (system-on-a-chip) technologies.

Our research aims to fill voids in the science and technology needed to strengthen the foundation of component-based design, integration and quality assurance for SISARL. We are also developing a general architectural framework, supported by a repository of user scenarios, SISARL application components, integration platforms and middleware, as well as verification and validation methods and tools, with which one can evaluate tradeoffs and carry out system integration, quality assurance and certification. The framework will provide an environment for experimentation with and evaluation of SISARL products and the methodologies and tools used to produce them.