Customizing Seniors’ Living Spaces: A Design Support System for Reconfiguring Bedrooms Integrating Ambient Assisted Living Solutions

The demographic shift towards an aging population poses unprecedented challenges in ensuring appropriate living conditions for the elderly, particularly those with chronic health issues. In the context of an increasing need for home adaptation in response to the needs of the elderly and caregivers, this paper introduces a novel design support system, merging Virtual Reality (VR) and semantic technologies to facilitate the reconfiguration of bedrooms, integrating Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions. The methodology combines a knowledge representation of user health conditions, physical environments, and device characteristics with a virtual simulation for pre-implementation evaluation. The system leverages domain ontologies to provide semantic and computational representations of the space and its features; the semantic knowledge base is engineered referencing building (IFC) and healthcare standards (ICF, ICD) alongside ontologies for devices and assistive technologies. The middleware is implemented to connect, translate, and exchange data between the ontologies and the VR-simulated environment. The system, exploiting semantic reasoning, can guide the designers in choosing the best options, including assistive technologies, spatial re-organization, and indoor comfort metrics. The reconfigured bedroom models can then be exported to any design software via IFC-BIM data exchange. Initial implementations demonstrate the system’s efficacy in customizing spaces for two user profiles with chronic conditions, proposing a comprehensive BIM-based tool for spatial and assistive technology integration in home spaces for enhanced elderly quality of life.