title: Ambient assisted living: a methodological approach.
abstract: In this paper, the most important challenges and trends related to the application of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) methods and techniques to the social/healthcare context are discussed. In order to find out technical solutions to these challenges, the main methodological issues concerning the design of open and distributed architectures are analyzed. The objective is to improve the efficiency/cost ratio in the provision of social and healthcare services to citizens with special needs, through the application of new paradigms in the context of AAL environments. Finally, some results and conclusions regarding the proposed open architecture are illustrated for the case of a distributed biomedical sensor network designed by the authors following this methodology.
authors.affiliation: CIBER de Bioingeniería, Biomateriales y Nanomedicina (CIBER-BBN) and the Biomedical Engineering Group, University of Seville, Spain. mestudillo@us.es
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Estudillo-Valderrama
authors.forename: Laura M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Roa
authors.forename: Javier
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Reina-Tosina
authors.forename: Isabel
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Roman-Martinez
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D001698:Biomedical Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D015374:Biosensing Techniques; D004867:Equipment Design; D006299:Health Services for the Aged; D006699:Home Care Services; D006801:Humans; D019451:Information Management / Q000379:methods*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D007256:Information Systems; D012984:Software