Disseminating Ambient Assisted Living in Rural Areas

The smart home, ambient intelligence and ambient assisted living have been intensively researched for decades. Although rural areas are an important potential market, because they represent about 80% of the territory of the EU countries and around 125 million inhabitants, there is currently a lack of applicable AAL solutions. This paper discusses the theoretical foundations of AAL in rural areas. This discussion is underlined by the achievements of the empirical field study, Casa Vecchia, which has been carried out over a four-year period in a rural area in Austria. The major goal of Casa Vecchia was to evaluate the feasibility of a specific form of AAL for rural areas: bringing AAL technology to the homes of the elderly, rather than moving seniors to special-equipped care facilities. The Casa Vecchia project thoroughly investigated the possibilities, challenges and drawbacks of AAL related to this specific approach. The findings are promising and somewhat surprising and indicate that further technical, interactional and socio-psychological research is required to make AAL in rural areas reasonable in the future.

[1]  Richard Harper,et al.  The Connected Home: The Future of Domestic Life , 2012 .

[2]  Diane J Cook,et al.  Assessing the Quality of Activities in a Smart Environment , 2009, Methods of Information in Medicine.

[3]  G. Demiris,et al.  Technologies for an Aging Society: A Systematic Review of “Smart Home” Applications , 2008, Yearbook of Medical Informatics.

[4]  Gerhard Leitner,et al.  End Users Programming Smart Homes - A Case Study on Scenario Programming , 2013, CHI-KDD.

[5]  Eric Bonsang.  Does informal care from children to their elderly parents substitute for formal care in Europe? , 2009, Journal of health economics.

[6]  Diane J. Cook,et al.  Keeping the Resident in the Loop: Adapting the Smart Home to the User , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans.

[7]  Philip Ball,et al.  A matter of taste , 2004, Nature materials.

[8]  Juan Carlos Augusto,et al.  Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments: A State of the Art , 2010, Handbook of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments.

[9]  Gerhard Leitner,et al.  Raising Awareness of Energy Consumption in Smart Living Environments , 2009, Intelligent Environments.

[10]  Annette Scherpenzeel,et al.  The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe , 2005, Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging.

[11]  Christina Goulding,et al.  Grounded theory, ethnography and phenomenology: A comparative analysis of three qualitative strategies for marketing research , 2005 .

[12]  Richard N. Griffiths,et al.  Towards inclusive digital television , 2011, Universal Access in the Information Society.

[13]  William C. Mann,et al.  The Gator Tech Smart House: a programmable pervasive space , 2005, Computer.

[14]  Paul Cuddihy,et al.  Algorithm to automatically detect abnormally long periods of inactivity in a home , 2007, HealthNet '07.

[15]  Richard Harper,et al.  Inside the Smart Home , 2003, Springer London.

[16]  Eric Campo,et al.  A review of smart homes - Present state and future challenges , 2008, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[17]  John N. A. Brown,et al.  Unifying interaction across distributed controls in a smart environment using anthropology-based computing to make human-computer interaction "Calm" , 2014 .

[18]  Gerhard Leitner,et al.  Towards an Acceptance Model for AAL , 2013, SouthCHI.

[19]  Martin Flöck.  Activity monitoring and automatic alarm generation in AAL-enabled homes , 2010 .

[20]  Asa MacWilliams,et al.  Smart Home Challenges and Approaches to Solve Them: A Practical Industrial Perspective , 2009 .

[21]  Stefan Saroiu,et al.  Home automation in the wild: challenges and opportunities , 2011, CHI.

[22]  Nelson Pacheco da Rocha,et al.  Usability, accessibility and ambient-assisted living: a systematic literature review , 2013, Universal Access in the Information Society.

[23]  Elizabeth D. Mynatt,et al.  Digital family portraits: supporting peace of mind for extended family members , 2001, CHI.

[24]  Li-Chen Fu,et al.  Service-Oriented Smart-Home Architecture Based on OSGi and Mobile-Agent Technology , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews).

[25]  G. Dewsbury.  The Social and Psychological Aspects of Smart Home Technolgy within the Care Sector , 2001 .

[26]  Elaine M. Huang,et al.  Hacking the Natural Habitat: An In-the-Wild Study of Smart Homes, Their Development, and the People Who Live in Them , 2012, Pervasive.

[27]  Alexander Felfernig,et al.  Toward the Next Generation of Recommender Systems: Applications and Research Challenges , 2013 .

[28]  Peter King,et al.  Private Dwelling: Contemplating the Use of Housing , 2004 .

[29]  Hong Sun,et al.  Promises and Challenges of Ambient Assisted Living Systems , 2009, 2009 Sixth International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations.

[30]  Diane J. Cook,et al.  Author's Personal Copy Pervasive and Mobile Computing Ambient Intelligence: Technologies, Applications, and Opportunities , 2022 .

[31]  Ákos Kiss,et al.  Ambient Assisted Living in Rural Areas: Vision and Pilot Application , 2007, AmI Workshops.

[32]  Alexander Felfernig,et al.  ReComment: towards critiquing-based recommendation with speech interaction , 2013, RecSys.

[33]  A. Strauss,et al.  The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research aldine de gruyter , 1968 .

[34]  Juan Carlos Augusto.  Handbook of Ambient Assisted Living - Technology for Healthcare, Rehabilitation and Well-being , 2012, Handbook of Ambient Assisted Living.

[35]  M. Skubic,et al.  Older adults' attitudes towards and perceptions of ‘smart home’ technologies: a pilot study , 2004, Medical informatics and the Internet in medicine.

[36]  Bo Yang,et al.  Smart home research , 2004, Proceedings of 2004 International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics (IEEE Cat. No.04EX826).

[37]  C. Brodsky.  The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research , 1968 .

[38]  W. Keith Edwards,et al.  At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges , 2001, UbiComp.

[39]  Terres Jean,et al.  Delimitations of Rural Areas in Europe Using Criteria of Population Density, Remoteness and Land Cover , 2009 .

[40]  P. Pasquina,et al.  Sensor technology for smart homes. , 2011, Maturitas.

[41]  N. Oudshoorn,et al.  Configuring the User as Everybody: Gender and Design Cultures in Information and Communication Technologies , 2004 .