scope:

Preface

The interest on the project for this book cannot be dissociated with the general interest on Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), especially in Europe. The European society is ageing, as other said western societies, and the consequences of this have to be foreseen in advance as to allow the elders that all of us will hopefully become, to live a life with quality in its many aspects. As recently heard in the corridors of a Personalized Medicine conference, if one is over 60 and knows no illnesses, this just means poor diagnostic. And yet we believe that physical senescence does not have to automatically imply loss of quality of life.

Personalized Medicine, Ambient Assisted Living and Enhanced Living Environments are often seen as the promise that, despite the inexorable advance of time, the science behind these technologies will allow us, future-to-be-elders (some sooner than others), to still enjoy a lifestyle that will not be impaired as a consequence of our loss of youth.

As AAL is such a broad area of interest that joins so many areas of science-from engineering to medicine, from business to psychology-it became a very complex task to focus the content of this book. Taking this into consideration, this volume arose from the interest in AAL and the willingness to bring together researchers with original work in this area of assisted living and to contribute to the enrichment of the state of the art, by helping disseminate good practices.

Our goal was to focus on the discussion of AAL technologies from its inception to implementation, creating a book whose content would be useful for students, practitioners, and users of AAL.

To achieve this, we included a comprehensive reference on methods, concepts, systems, devices, and services that provide unobtrusive support for the daily needs of an assisted person. This book also provides extensive coverage of applications, software, and information management for AAL, as well as coverage of the latest hardware and software for ergonomic design pertaining to AAL. Ambient intelligence is a covered key concept, which refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people.

The hardest challenge was to get the right mix of researchers and authors who could contribute in for a well-balanced content. We believe that the goals we have defined at the beginning of this project were achieved and the book we now present will be a valuable tool for researchers and practitioners in the AAL area.

We would like to sincerely acknowledge all the contributors and specially thank CRC Press for coming forward to publish this volume. We appreciate the efforts of the reviewers and the editorial team for coming up with an excellent edition, in particular the work of Paula Sousa and Virginie Felizardo, whose organizational and scientific skills were essential to the closure of the project. We also want to acknowledge the contribution of COST Action IC1303 Architectures, Algorithms and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE).