Purpose Assistive living technologies provide support for specific activities, transforming a home into a smart home. The purpose of this paper is to present how to design, implement, deploy and install a personalized ambient support system for the elderly suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and nighttime wandering. Design/methodology/approach The intervention presented in this paper proceeds in two phases. During the monitoring phase, the system determines the profile of the person with AD, based on nighttime routines. Data are gathered from sensors dispatched in the smart home, coupled with physiological data obtained from sensors worn by the person. Data are then classified to determine engine rules that will provide assistance to the resident to satisfy their needs. During the second phase, smart assistance is provided to the person via environmental cues by triggering rules based on the person’s habits and the activities occurring during night. Findings The paper develops the architecture of a non-intrusive system that integrates heterogeneous technologies to provide a calm environment during night and limit wandering periods. Practical implications The goal is to help people age well at home as long as possible and recover a regular circadian cycle while providing more comfort to the caregiver. Originality/value The system presented in this paper offers a calm and personalized environment with music and visual icons to soothe persons with AD and encourage them to go back to bed. It is installed at the patient’s home using wireless technologies.

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Objectives: This work presents an ambient-assisted living application that encourages seniors during nocturnal wandering episodes to return to bed in calm and comfort reassurance. Methods: Structuring knowledge by designing a software architecture capable of delivering high-level analysis and processing. A senior's home has been upgraded into a smart home enabling the gathering of habits for two weeks and set up for personalized assistance over four weeks. Home automation devices associated with Actigraph monitors and self-reported sleep were used for more accuracy.Results: The architectural model can be used in ambient-assisted living applications for which data collection is permanent and continuous. Its layered organization facilitates the management of specific and general activities of daily life. The results of the home experience show that the system gave a notification whenever the need arose. On the other hand, it allowed the caregiver to get more information about the lifestyle of the senior. Conclusions: Future work should focus on providing more services to contextualize assistance. Ontology is used to structure all the ambient knowledge of the smart home. We also plan to do more home experiments.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environments encompass technical systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) tools to support seniors in their daily routines. They aim to enable seniors to live independently and safely for as long as possible when faced declining physical or cognitive capacities. This work presents the design, development and deployment of an AAL system in the context of smart cities. The proposed architecture is based on microservices and software components. We examined the requirements and specifications of AAL systems in smart homes, in efforts to describe and evaluate how they would be transposable in the case of smart cities. The system has been tested and evaluated in the laboratory; it has been deployed in real life settings within city and is still in use by five elderly people.

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