Exploring the ambient assisted living domain: a systematic review

Abstract

Ambient assisted living (AAL) is focused on providing assistance to people primarily in their natural environment. Over the past decade, the AAL domain has evolved at a fast pace in various directions. The stakeholders of AAL are not only limited to patients, but also include their relatives, social services, health workers, and care agencies. In fact, AAL aims at increasing the life quality of patients, their relatives and the health care providers with a holistic approach. This paper aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the AAL domain, presenting a systematic analysis of over 10 years of relevant literature focusing on the stakeholders’ needs, bridging the gap of existing reviews which focused on technologies. The findings of this review clearly show that until now the AAL domain neglects the view of the entire AAL ecosystem. Furthermore, the proposed solutions seem to be tailored more on the basis of the available existing technologies, rather than supporting the various stakeholders’ needs. Another major lack that this review is pointing out is a missing adequate evaluation of the various solutions. Finally, it seems that, as the domain of AAL is pretty new, it is still in its incubation phase. Thus, this review calls for moving the AAL domain to a more mature phase with respect to the research approaches.