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different programs for eHealth, telehomecare and
AAL. Unfortunately, most of the programs have
problems in achieving acceptance and founder on
introducing the product on the market, because
of two major barriers (Ponsard, Marin, Walsh,
Rousseaux, Rinaldi, & Tamburriello, 2008): (ii)
the personal dimension of patient health, and (ii)
the large number of organizations involved in the
care process.
Disintegration makes it difficult to provide
high quality care for elderly. Good and efficient
delivery of health care is depended on knowledge
and a contemporary access to information. Tech-
nologies for situation-aware AAL and informa-
tion and communication technologies can help
to improve eldercare at home. Envisioned living
assistants promise safety, community health ser-
vices and standardized information transferred
by communication technologies. But most of the
technological achievements focus on a specific
dimension and are isolated applications.
Projects often fail to address these issues
because they are only focusing on technological
aspects. Sometimes, new technological achieve-
ments for the elderly lead to a redesign of existing
processes and require a careful implementation.
Especially homecare is situated in a complex area
where different social and healthcare organiza-
tions meet.
However, technological devices are only ac-
cepted when they can be integrated in the daily
working process of professional caregivers. Meet-
ing these demands requires a detailed analysis of
the processes, roles and competences of the per-
sonal in the participating organizations. Effective
and efficient process management is tailored to
the demands of the customers. Surprisingly little
is known about the demands and competence of
the people who use eHealth and AAL technolo-
gies: the elderly, their relatives and the caregivers.
Process analysis and an intense involvement of all
stakeholders are important requirements to build
successfully integrated AAL systems. Therefore,
a global approach for research is necessary. An
interdisciplinary research group should consist of
scientists from the domains software engineer-
ing, medical informatics, medical engineering,
economical and social science. Together with
caregivers and elderly people new applications
can be developed in order to enhance the quality
of life.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
Since AmI systems mainly depend on sensor data,
research related to body-worn sensors improves
the amount and quality of data gathered in a
pervasive way. Improved chip calculation power
pushes processing and analyzing tasks much
closer to the patient. For instance, the usage of
ground reaction forces for gait analysis in sports,
pathological gaits and rehabilitation. Related to
that work is a method described by (Ali, Atallah,
Lo, & Yang, 2009) for identifying and analyzing
transitional activities in the context of pervasive
sensing. Previous studies mainly focus on binary
transitions between activities, but do not consider
that the transition period can be prolonged and
may be indicative of the progression of disease.
There are already a lot of pilot projects dealing
with the problem of data exchange between various
home, health- and social care systems. Standards
and structures for exchanging information are
already well defined. What is missing is on the
one hand, that these pilot projects become real
usable products. On the other hand the focus of
research projects is on how to exchange data, but
not on which data are exchanged. AAL data are not
comparable among each other (ADL monitoring
vs. fall detection) because they lack similarity or at
least intelligent models behind them. The area of
semantic interoperability concerning patient care
and information systems, in form of nomenclature,
terminology and information models, is a future
research direction.
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