Area overview.Digital Innovation for Ambient Assisted Living.
Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) refers to the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in a person's daily living and working environment to enable them to stay active longer, remain socially connected and live independently into old age. AAL can trace its roots back to home automation and assistive domotics. In recent years, work in the field has intensified, taking advantage of new developments in sensor technology, reduced sizes and costs and increased processing power in computing devices. The services employed in AAL for decision making include, among others, activity recognition and behavior understanding, person or object location and indoor/outdoor localization and tracking. Human-human or human-object interaction is also important in AAL environments for understanding ongoing activity or performance and clinical assessment.
Facts & Figures.Indicators for Ambient Assisted Living.
Demographic and epidemiologic transitions have brought a new health care paradigm with the presence of both growing elderly population and chronic diseases. Life expectancy is increasing as well as the need for long-term care. The ageing process involves a series of changes across different organs and systems typically producing a reduction in the organ functional reserve and in turn a situation of frailty, 17% of those older than 65 years of age and social vulnerability. If the elderly population is going to double worldwide in the next 30 years, from 11% to 22%, an increase in the probability of dependency and long term institutional care is therefore expected. Although the aforementioned implications of ageing impose societal challenges, at the same time AAL brings new opportunities for the ageing population of Europe and the healthcare systems.
Our mission.ESDALAB DIH for Digital Innovation in Ambient Assisted Living.
For ESDALAB DIH, AAL is an area of paramount importance. During the last years, the hub has developed services and infrastructures that enabled the actual implementation of Europe 2020 Strategy for Active and Healthy Ageing in the area South and Eastern Europe (SEE). The activities of ESDALAB DIH in AAL are closely related to e-Health & Hospital 4.0. Actually, the two domains, although different, they are interrelated and strongly depend on each other. ESDALAB DIH supports the seamless integration of services offered in AAL environments with the corresponding services employed in e-Health & Hospital 4.0 systems. To support this, ESDALAB DIH has developed Ambient Assisted Living House (AAL House), a real, fully operational house that includes the latest AAL technologies and services. AAL House is actually an open access platform that allows SMEs and slightly bigger companies to get acquainted with the latest AAL technology standards and services, experiment and evaluate their products in a real digitized environment.