Disseminating ambient assisted living in rural areas.

Gerhard Leitner,Anton Fercher,Martin Hitz,Alexander Felfernig

doi:10.3390/s140813496

Gerhard Leitner, Anton Fercher + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/s140813496

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Abstract

The smart home, ambient intelligence and ambient assisted living have been intensively researched for decades. Although rural areas are an important potential market, because they represent about 80% of the territory of the EU countries and around 125 million inhabitants, there is currently a lack of applicable AAL solutions. This paper discusses the theoretical foundations of AAL in rural areas. This discussion is underlined by the achievements of the empirical field study, Casa Vecchia, which has been carried out over a four-year period in a rural area in Austria. The major goal of Casa Vecchia was to evaluate the feasibility of a specific form of AAL for rural areas: bringing AAL technology to the homes of the elderly, rather than moving seniors to special-equipped care facilities. The Casa Vecchia project thoroughly investigated the possibilities, challenges and drawbacks of AAL related to this specific approach. The findings are promising and somewhat surprising and indicate that further technical, interactional and socio-psychological research is required to make AAL in rural areas reasonable in the future.

Highlights

Ambient intelligence (AmI), in the definition of [1], is “aiming at a proactive, but sensible support of people in their daily lives”
The colors of the LEDs differed: some of them were only able to flash in one color; others were flashing in different colors signaling different states
We tried to observe the life of real people in their real living environments and their social network and to induce a theoretical framework from that data according to the approach of grounded theory [46]

Summary

Introduction

Ambient intelligence (AmI), in the definition of [1], is “aiming at a proactive, but sensible support of people in their daily lives”. There is currently a new wave of interest in ambient assisted living (AAL), which can be seen as a specific type of AmI aimed at supporting the elderly in their living contexts. A wide variety of AmI functionality is available that could be meaningfully applied in AAL. Such an application requires a stable, but flexible technical infrastructure upon which to build. In the private residential building sector, technology subsumed under the term smart home could serve as such an infrastructure. Given that the smart home has long been a matter of interest in industry, as well as in academia, it could be expected that the technical prerequisites for providing AAL should be fulfilled. High expectations had to be repeatedly revised downwards in the past [2,3], but the technological prerequisites are not the only uncertainties to be considered in order to transform AAL [4] from fiction to future

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