Ambient Assisted Living: Home Care
J.UCS Special Issue
Ramón Hervás
(Modelling Ambient Intelligence Research Group
Castilla-La Mancha University, Ciudad Real, Spain
Ramon.HLucas@uclm.es)
José Bravo
(Modelling Ambient Intelligence Research Group
Castilla-La Mancha University, Ciudad Real, Spain
Jose.Bravo@uclm.es)
Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) proposes solutions based on Information
and Communication Technologies (ITC) to enhance the quality of life of
older people. AAL promotes the provision of infrastructures and
services for the independent or more autonomous living, via the
seamless integration of info-communication technologies within homes
and residences, thus increasing their quality of life and autonomy and
reducing the need for being institutionalized or aiding it when it
happens (See: http://www.aal-europe.eu/).
According to the European Union, up to 19 Million persons give primary
assistance with daily activities to their elderly or dependent
relatives. Moreover, most people prefer to live independently in their
own homes. However, formal care services are in many cases
indispensable and, in this way, ICT-based solutions can enable and
sustain older adults to continue managing their daily activities in
their homes. Thus, this edition focuses on "Home Care" solutions
for elderly according with the 5th call of AAL Joint Programme.
This manuscript is the preface for the special issue entitled
"Ambient Assisted Living: Home Care" which gathers the selected
papers from the public call for papers opened during Autumn 2012 and
from a selection of papers of the 4th International Work-conference on
Ambient Assisted Living (IWAAL 2012), held in Vitoria-Gasteiz,
December 3-5, 2012.
The scientific committee of the conference selected the best papers
addressing Home Care on Ambient Assisted Living after the conference
based on marks scored by chairmen and referees. The extended versions
of these papers and the papers received from the open call were
collected to additional rounds of peer reviews. The most scored papers
have been included in this special issue, covering topics such as
novel systems and processes to treat diseases (e.g. obesity),
tele-mobile-monitoring, rapid development of tele-medical solutions,
multi-agent solutions for people monitoring, mobile-based activity
recognition, virtual and augmented reality solutions.
More specifically, Jaime Guixeres, et. al., in the manuscript entitled
"Effects of Virtual Reality during Exercise in Children" have analyzed
how virtual reality may serve to enhance the psychological benefits of
exercise as a kind of home-care. They conducted two studies measuring
more than 200 children and the studying benefits of virtual reality as
a support for aerobic exercise.
In the manuscript "Evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy Capabilities
for Tele-mobile Monitoring in Home-Care", Antonio J. Jara, et.al.,
have compared Bluetooth Low Energy with other alternatives in a
general perspective and focusing on health tele-monitoring in Ambient
Assisted Living scenarios.
Jan Havlik et. al., discussed about remote patient monitoring in the
paper "A Modular System for Rapid Development of Telemedical
Devices". This manuscript describes the hardware solution of a
modular system focused on the rapid development of tele-medical
devices. For practical use, the proposed system tries to satisfy
additional requirements, namely low power consumption, small size,
lightweight, and long battery life.
Also, regarding to patient monitoring, the paper entitle "An Alert
System for People Monitoring Based on Multi-Agents using Maps"
(Pilar Castro, et. al.) shows a novel system to monitor the activities
of users collecting data from mobile device sensors via agents. In
particular, this system allows defining new alarms, agents and
functionalities in an easy way, allowing the scalability of the
system.
Tele-diagnosis is also an important topic related to home care. In
these terms, Maria-Aydee Sanchez-Santana proposed a system to
semi-automatically identify and quantify potential health
complications in the paper "A Tool for Telediagnosis of
Cardiovascular Diseases in a Collaborative and Adaptive
Approach". This system provides remote collaborative sharing of
this information among different actors in the field of medicine
(nurses, practitioners, etc.).
The paper "Energy Efficient Smartphone-Based Activity Recognition
using Fixed-Point Arithmetic" (Davide Anguita et. al.) presents a
novel approach for the classification of Activities of Daily Living
using smartphones and based on a modified Support Vector Machine model
that works with fixed-point arithmetic. This work can be applied to
AAL applications such as remote patient monitoring.
Maria Lourdes Martínez-Villaseñor and Miguel González-Mendoza have
proposed a process that considers internal structure of source data
for the schema integration with a ubiquitous user model. As the paper
"An Enhanced Process of Concept Alignment for Dealing with
Overweight and Obesity" shows, that process examines data exacted
from different applications and devices to deal with diseases.
Finally, the paper entitle "Achieving Adaptive Augmented Reality
through Ontological Context-Awareness applied to AAL Scenarios"
analyzes how ontological knowledge representation and management can
personalize augmented-reality-based applications for home-care.
The editors wish to thank Christian Gütl (Managing Editor) for
providing us with the opportunity to edit this special issue. Also, we
would also like to give our thanks to Ms. Dana Kaiser (Assistant
Editor) of the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS) for all
her kind help in the preparation of this issue.
Ramón Hervás
José Bravo
Guest editors
|