Ambient intelligence for ubiquitous health and wellbeing

The effects of age-related decline prevent many people from enjoying full, independent, productive, and highquality lives. Smart Homes have been proposed as an innovative solution in an attempt to address these issues in an effort to provide support to both elderly and people with disabilities in their daily life. In addition, Smart Homes technologies (ubiquitous computing) can be used as means to improve both the quality of care and wellbeing of dependent people. In one hand, ubiquitous health-based applications involving monitoring and processing of vital signs and enabling a rapid intervention in case of emergency are expected to become crucial services. In other hand, assistive services could provide a strong impact on the wellbeing of people. With such an approach, two main issues may be addressed: first, the person can remain within their own home and be safe and secure for an extended period of time, and second, offer a reformed approach for the way in which healthcare is delivered and managed. Embedded within these visions of creating a smart environment within which people can live for an extended period of time emerges the notion of ambient intelligent technologies. These technologies offer promising prospects to assist people with special needs. Nevertheless, they are an emerging research field which faces numerous challenges. Ambient Assistive Living (AAL), which is a European initiative, deals with a new vision of the digital world, where computing, devices, and sensors are deployed everywhere (for example, at home, in buildings, and within urban spaces) to assist people. These technologies enable more intelligent and unobtrusive user interaction with the surrounding environment. The AAL community has the goal of including more intelligence within such environments. Such an increased level of intelligence has the potential to provide improved levels of user support in addition to helping users access the knowledge required to offer better decisions when interacting with these environments. With the rapidly growing aging population on a global scale, the need of improving elderly wellbeing is getting crucial. Ambient Intelligence solutions are, therefore, increasingly becoming viable options for independent living. There is a need for increased sophistication in the homes and living environments of the elderly, and in the devices and artifacts that surround these living environments. The focus has moved beyond devices and electronics to reasoning, learning, monitoring, tracking, and providing context aware assistance, all within a framework of building accurate models covering the application domain. Despite the complexity and sophistication of this new generation of smart space, their realization must be intuitive (by providing innovative M. Mokhtari (*) CNRS IPAL (UMI 2955) Singapore, Institut Telecom France, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R/A-STAR), 1 Fusionopolis Way, # 21-01 Connexis (South Tower), Singapore 138632, Singapore e-mail: Mounir.Mokhtari@it-sudparis.eu