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Since data processed by these systems state a
lot about a patient's behavior and health status, the
data have to be protected properly. The national
data protection regulations vary dramatically,
therefore the systems data protection must not
only follow these regulations, instead some kind
of pluggable data protection concepts should be
used, which guarantees data protection throughout
the system and integrated services. Ways must
be found to unbundle und put together recorded
data from the beginning of a patient's health
monitoring device to the processing units of the
AAL system. This guarantees that data and their
specific patient's relationship remains open up to
the point a certified component with the proper
data protection in place is able to put the needed
data pieces together.
The research effort should lead to practical
and excepted systems with well-balanced busi-
ness models. Further research has to work out
collaborative enterprise network models and
business models for AAL services, where patients,
healthcare providers, health insurances, and rela-
tives are properly considered.
teroperability can only be achieved by consistently
utilizing Continua and IHE standards. In particular,
Continua and IHE are the key facilitators to make
precisely defined information and data models
applicable and interoperable. The challenge is
now to thoroughly run these systems in various
studies, so that reliable real world data can be
obtained from elderly in a social-organizational
context, while including technical relevant data.
This should help to further improve these systems
in a social-organizational, social-economical and
technical context.
The demands for eldercare are manifold and
a large amount of technological solutions in the
area of AAL exist. As good and efficient delivery
of health care depends on knowledge, skills, and
timely access to information (Comyn, 2007),
our research aims at a comprehensive approach.
In this chapter the results of a multidisciplinary
research are presented, which integrates aspects of
situation aware AAL as well as health related data
integration. In addition, it is necessary to identify
the needs of elderly and professional health care
givers and encourage the acceptance concerning
AAL. Thus, further multidisciplinary research is
needed to foster the cooperation between different
scientific disciplines for handling the challenges
of demographic change. The INVERSIA project
(Innovative VERSorgungsstruktren Im Alter;
2010-2013), partly funded by the European Union,
follows this recommendation by considering tech-
nological aspects, socio-organizational aspects
(consumer demands and collaborative networks)
as well as financial aspects (business and financ-
ing models) related to ambient assisted living.
CONCLUSION
Situation-aware AAL systems provide (on a con-
ceptual level) a powerful infrastructure to help
elderly and care-dependent people to live autono-
mously. Some of the developments are driven by
technological advances of wireless communica-
tion, sensors and mobile devices, which ease the
application of such systems. The integration of
homecare and institutional healthcare into these
systems helps to improve the impact and the ef-
ficiency of eldercare, while keeping the financial
effort at a moderate level.
The importance of these issues led to the
development of systems covering situation-
aware AAL and health data exchange based on
standards, which were presented in this chapter
in an elaborated way. A high degree of system in-
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research is partially funded by the Austrian
Research Promotion Agency (FFG), the European
Regional Development Fund (ERDF) in coopera-
tion with the Upper Austrian state government
(REGIO 13, Innovative Upper Austria, Health
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