Pervasive technologies for assistive environments: special issue of PETRA 2008 conference

As the diffusion of computing technology into everyday life continues at an exponential rate, the technology is becoming increasingly embedded in artefacts and environments. One important environment for this diffusion is the domestic environment or ‘‘Oikos’’ as it was known in ancient Greece. People’s living environment is particularly important when one takes into account the world’s ageing population and that as people grow older, they will increasingly rely on technology. People will, however, have differing levels of computer knowledge and assisted living needs. In addition, awareness towards the elderly and the need of constant medical supervision for chronic patients or habitants of remote, isolated and underserved locations has risen recently. To this end, services once available at a few centralized locations, such as high quality medical services, are now intended to be made available through a network anytime, anyplace and to anyone [1]. In such an environment, provision of medical data communication is currently dependent on lowbandwidth point-to-point telemedicine systems [2–6]. An easily field-deployable ad hoc wireless network or even a basic sensor network [7] could provide a significant improvement in real-time patient monitoring and emergency communications capability in general. This special issue comes after the successful organization of the 1st ACM International Conference on ‘‘PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments—PETRA 2008’’, which was held from 15th till 19th of July 2008, in Athens, Greece (http://www.petrae.org/). In this special issue, we have tried to include extended in-depth analysis of the best works announced in the PETRA 2008 conference, dealing with the application of pervasive ubiquitous computing to assistive environments, taking also into account the target audience of the PUC journal. As already mentioned, the word ‘‘assistive’’ is used in a general way that includes not only assisting persons with obvious physical limitations and disabilities, but also empowering any human to improve his/her quality of life by enhancing sensing at all levels [8, 9]. The research works included in this special issue show how pervasive and ubiquitous technologies can put computers to the service of man and become assistive. As a result, the special issue is comprised by papers describing systems, algorithms and methodologies from 3 major thematic areas: (1) activity and behaviour recognition [10–12], (2) advanced and personalized human computer interfaces [13, 14] and (3) biomedical monitoring platforms [15, 16, 18]. More specifically, Bamis et al. [10] in their paper present a scalable framework for detailed behaviour interpretation of elders. The paper reports their early deployment experiences and presents the current progress in three main components: sensors, middleware and behaviour interpretation mechanisms that aim to make effective monitoring and assistive services a reality. I. Maglogiannis (&) Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics, University of Central Greece, Papasiopoulou 2-4, 35100 Lamia, Greece e-mail: imaglo@ucg.gr