The Missing Ones: Key Ingredients Towards Effective Ambient Assisted Living Systems
This addresses the need for cost-effective solutions to support the growing elderly population, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing AAL concepts by emphasizing human integration.
The paper tackles the challenge of increasing human participation in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems for the elderly, proposing a mutual assistance community with a service-oriented approach and showing preliminary simulation results that support its effectiveness.
The population of elderly people keeps increasing rapidly, which becomes a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a new approach which promises to address the needs from elderly people. In this paper, we claim that human participation is a key ingredient towards effective AAL systems, which not only saves social resources, but also has positive relapses on the psychological health of the elderly people. Challenges in increasing the human participation in ambient assisted living are discussed in this paper and solutions to meet those challenges are also proposed. We use our proposed mutual assistance community, which is built with service oriented approach, as an example to demonstrate how to integrate human tasks in AAL systems. Our preliminary simulation results are presented, which support the effectiveness of human participation.