Social Inclusion in AAL Environments: Home Automation and Convenience Services for Elderly Users

Traditionally, Ambient Assisted Living applications focus on health-related services, like the detection of emergency situations, long-term treatment of chronic diseases, or the prevention and early-detection of illnesses. Over the last years, more and more projects started to extend these classical healthcare scenarios by designing applications that explicitly aim at increasing well-being and social inclusion for elderly users. With the transition away from purely medical services towards integrated homecare environments, holistic design concepts and evaluation approaches will become necessary. This paper takes a detailed look at state-of-the-art applications in this field and illustrates emerging challenges for the design and development of future homecare systems.