Ambient intelligence in assisted living: Enable elderly people to handle future interfaces

Abstract

Ambient Assisted Living is currently one of the important research and development areas, where accessibility, usability and learning plays a major role and where future interfaces are an important concern for applied engineering. The general goal of ambient assisted living solutions is to apply ambient intelligence technology to enable people with specific demands, e.g. handicapped or elderly, to live in their preferred environment longer. Due to the high potential of emergencies, a sound emergency assistance is required, for instance assisting elderly people with comprehensive ambient assisted living solutions sets high demands on the overall system quality and consequently on software and system engineering - user acceptance and support by various user-interfaces is an absolute necessity. In this article, we present an Assisted Living Laboratory that is used to train elderly people to handle modern interfaces for Assisted Living and evaluate the usability and suitability of these interfaces in specific situations, e.g., emergency cases. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.