The continuous increase in life expectancy poses a challenge for health systems in modern societies, especially with respect to older people living in rural low-populated areas, both in terms of isolation and difficulty to access and communicate with health services. In this paper, we address these issues by applying the Digital Avatars framework to Gerontechnology. Building on our previous work on mobile and social computing, in particular the People as a Service model, Digital Avatars make intensive use of the capabilities of current smartphones to collect information about their owners, and applies techniques of Complex Event Processing extended with uncertainty for inferring the habits and preferences of the user of the phone and building with them a virtual profile. These virtual profiles allow to monitor the well-being and quality of life of older adults, reminding pharmacological treatments and home health testings, and raising alerts when an anomalous situation is detected.

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Population ageing, together with the desire to maintain an autonomous lifestyle, poses today’s societies with a challenge that technological advances can help considerably to cope with. The widespread use of smartphones and their increasing computing power and storage capacity make them the ideal tool to achieve this goal. In this paper, we present Digital Avatars, a software framework adapted to the needs of older adults who wish to preserve their lifestyle, but who require assistance through technology. Building on previous work on the People as a Service model, Digital Avatars takes advantage of a smartphone’s capabilities and services to collect information about the people who own them. To do this, it applies Complex Event Processing techniques extended with uncertainty to infer the habits, preferences, and needs of the device owner to build with them an enhanced virtual profile of the user. These virtual profiles are the mechanism for monitoring the quality of life of older adults: analyzing their patterns of activity, reminding them of medication schedules, or detecting risky situations that generate alerts to relatives, caregivers, or the community health system.

The number of devices connected to the internet is constantly growing, which implies an increased complexity when interacting with so many heterogeneous devices. Automating this process is key to keep up with this growth. This People as a Service model works towards developing virtual profiles for every user in their own mobile devices and under their full control. These profiles allow to establish user preferences and predefined parameters, which are then applied by the devices they connect to. By integrating both the information in the virtual profiles and these devices, we can create a context in which to make smart decisions and apply them automatically, all of this in a decentralised way. In order to show our proposal in action, we have developed a treasure hunting game as a proof of concept to bring to the spotlight the utility of an environment with programmatically adapted devices.