Taking care of elders in a nursing home is not an easy task. Caregivers face two major problems: a lack of awareness of the situations surrounding the elderly care and the lack of information regarding the availability and the activities of other caregivers to support their coordination process. Various efforts have proposed solutions to cope with these problems, but they do it without considering all the requirements imposed by the criticality of this type of environment. In this paper we propose CANoE, a model for the design of context-aware notifications in critical environments, such as a nursing home. The main feature of this model is that it considers three sources of context (the environment, and the issuer and the receiver of the notification) for adapting the content, the terms of delivery and the presentation of the notification message. Based on the CANoE model we developed the CANoE-Aw and CU-IDA systems, which were evaluated through two case studies in a nursing home. The results of these evaluations provide evidence that caregivers achieved an increased awareness of the situations of care of the elderly and perceived the systems as adequate tools to support their coordination while attending a situation of care.

Taking care of an elder with cognitive decline is not an easy task. Given their condition, elders could be involved in situations that may affect their physical integrity or quality of life, and caregivers may be unaware of the situation or not be able to attend it on time. This paper proposes a context-aware notification environment to support the work of caregivers. The aim is to increase the caregiver's awareness about the situations of care of older people in a nursing home, so that caregivers could act appropriately and timely to attend those situations. Firstly, we present the results of a study to understand the situations of care that occur at a nursing home. Later, we propose the design of a context-aware notification environment whose design was informed by this understanding. One of the main features of this environment is that it takes into consideration the contextual information both from the caregiver and from the elder in order to adapt the notification. Preliminary results of the evaluation of an implementation with an audio notification mechanism are promising. During the evaluation period caregivers perceived an increase in their awareness of the situations of care and a safer working environment regarding the provided quality of care.

Ambient intelligence is one of the most exciting fields of application for pervasive, wireless, and embedded computing. However, the design and implementation of real-world systems must be conducted utilizing software engineering approaches. Some types of environments (hospitals, older adults homes, emergency scenarios, etc.) are particularly critical, especially in terms of the issues concerning expressing requirements, verifying and validating them, or ensuring functional correctness. To provide adequate ambient intelligence solutions, it is necessary to place special emphasis on obtaining, specifying, and documenting software requirements. To address this issue, our paper presents a model that integrates both requirements and design patterns. This is done through a natural language processing application in conjunction with other artificial intelligence algorithms. This work aims to support designers when analyzing text requirements and support design decisions. Our results were evaluated according to the cross-validated accuracy of predicting design patterns. The results obtained indicate that this approach could lead to good recommendations of design patterns, as it demonstrated an acceptable classification performance over the balanced dataset of requirements instances.