The missing ones: Key ingredients towards effective ambient assisted living systems

Abstract

The population of elderly people keeps increasing rapidly in the past decades, 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 influence on the psychological health of the elderly people. Challenges in increasing human participation in ambient assisted living are dis-cussed in this paper and solutions to meet those challenges are also proposed. We use our proposed mutual assistance commu-nity, which is built with service oriented architecture, as an example to demonstrate how to integrate human tasks in AAL sys-tems. Our preliminary simulation results are presented, which support the effectiveness of human participation.