title: Ambient assisted living healthcare frameworks, platforms, standards, and quality attributes.
abstract: Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is an emerging multi-disciplinary field aiming at exploiting information and communication technologies in personal healthcare and telehealth systems for countering the effects of growing elderly population. AAL systems are developed for personalized, adaptive, and anticipatory requirements, necessitating high quality-of-service to achieve interoperability, usability, security, and accuracy. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the AAL field with a focus on healthcare frameworks, platforms, standards, and quality attributes. To achieve this, we conducted a literature survey of state-of-the-art AAL frameworks, systems and platforms to identify the essential aspects of AAL systems and investigate the critical issues from the design, technology, quality-of-service, and user experience perspectives. In addition, we conducted an email-based survey for collecting usage data and current status of contemporary AAL systems. We found that most AAL systems are confined to a limited set of features ignoring many of the essential AAL system aspects. Standards and technologies are used in a limited and isolated manner, while quality attributes are often addressed insufficiently. In conclusion, we found that more inter-organizational collaboration, user-centered studies, increased standardization efforts, and a focus on open systems is needed to achieve more interoperable and synergetic AAL solutions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering, Aarhus University, Aarhus 8200, Denmark. mume@eng.au.dk.
authors.forename: Mukhtiar
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Memon
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering, Aarhus University, Aarhus 8200, Denmark. sw@eng.au.dk.
authors.forename: Stefan Rahr
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering, Aarhus University, Aarhus 8200, Denmark. cfp@eng.au.dk.
authors.forename: Christian Fischer
authors.initials: CF
authors.lastname: Pedersen
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering, Aarhus University, Aarhus 8200, Denmark. feay@eng.au.dk.
authors.forename: Femina Hassan Aysha
authors.initials: FH
authors.lastname: Beevi
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering, Aarhus University, Aarhus 8200, Denmark. foh@eng.au.dk.
authors.forename: Finn Overgaard
authors.initials: FO
authors.lastname: Hansen
mesh_terms: D040561:Assisted Living Facilities / Q000592:standards*; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D011787:Quality of Health Care / Q000592:standards*; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000592:standards*