Easychair

Write to the steering committee

the call for papers

First International Workshop on
AAL SERVICE PLATFORMS (WASP 2010)

A one-day workshop to be held at IEEE Healthcom 2010
Lyon, France, July 2, 2010

List of accepted papers now available

OBJECTIVES

As the European population ages, more support is needed with fewer hands to cater for their needs. There is a significant market potential for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions, but adoption is limited because they require significant resources for implementation.

This fact gives rise to a stringent need for an open technological platform supporting a wide range of diverse stakeholders (including end users, developers, service providers, public and private care providers). Such a platform would provide a standardised approach to the development of AAL services, thus making it technically feasible and economically viable to develop AAL solutions.

The realization of such a platform can be achieved by mixing new development and consolidation of state-of-the-art results from existing initiatives. This approach not only poses technical challenges but also raises issues regarding adoption and uptake. For such an approach to be successful, the establishment of a sustainable community is mandatory. This workshop is intended as a first step in this direction. It will provide a forum in which the technical challenges related to the development of such a platform, the establishment of a AAL community, and the tools and methods to sustain such community will be discussed by the interested stakeholders.

WASP 2010 is promoted and supported by the EU FP7 universAAL project (http://www.universaal.org) which has as its mandate to build such a community and platform. The workshop is held in conjunction with the IEEE 12th International Conference of E-Health, Networking, Applications & Services (IEEE HealthCom 2010).

We encourage researchers and practitioners within the field of AAL, smart environments, and distributed systems to attend the workshop and to discuss first-hand-experiences with other experts.

Accepted papers

Thomas Fuxreiter, Christopher Mayer, Sten Hanke, Matthias Gira, Miroslav Sili and Johannes Kropf. A Modular Platform for Event Recognition in Smart Homes

Abstract: Ambient Assisted Living technologies try to integrate intelligent assistance-systems in elder people’s homes to maintain a high degree of independence, autonomy and dignity. To speed up the development process and to make the applications more adaptive and flexible to special user needs as well as to ensure compatibility throughout systems a common middleware with standardized interfaces is desirable. The integration of off-the-shelf sensor hardware is an important aspect to assure longterm applicability and interoperability. AIT Austrian Institute of Technology has developed a modular software platform providing services to enable independent living for elder people at home. The platform is based on state-of-the-art software development techniques like OSGi and Spring, which enable modularity and flexibility. The aspect of interoperability at the hardware level is considered by integrating standards from the two areas of medical informatics and home automation. A hardware abstraction module harmonizes data from different sensor networks in terms of a common data format. Based on sensor data functionalities for the detection of specific events and situations in the AAL domain have been implemented using finite state machines and simple statistical methods.

Frank Wartena, Johan Muskens, Lars Schmitt and Milan Petković. Continua: The Reference Architecture of a Personal Telehealth Ecosystem

Abstract. The Continua Health Alliance, which was started in 2006 to enable an interoperable personal telehealth ecosystem, has become a major force in the personal telehealth domain. Within one year after the release of the Version One Design Guidelines over a dozen interoperable products have been officially Continua Certified and many more are coming. In parallel Continua continued its technical developments and has since made great progress on defining interoperability for the LAN and WAN interfaces, and with that now enables end-to-end interoperability. In this paper we motivate why the establishment of such an ecosystem is an essential part in addressing the healthcare challenges in society and why it is essential to address interoperability. The paper introduces the Continua Health Alliance and describes in detail the Continua end-to-end architecture and guidelines, including its security aspects.

Clarissa Tacchella, Thimoty Barbieri, Piero Fraternali and Antonio Bianchi. AutonomaMente Project – Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Multimodal Domotic Application to Support Persons with Cognitive Disabilities

Abstract. The AutonomaMente project developed a highly customizable application based on multimodal communication (speech, icons, text) to support autonomous living of persons with cognitive disabilities in special apartments fitted with domotic sensors. Its functionalities are designed to support everyday social activities of the users: using the telephone in a simple way, schedule appointments, keep track of time and organize personal finances and savings. A second evaluation is in progress in order to understand strong and weak points of both software and approach used to train users and caregivers. The aim of this paper is to expose the approach used and the solutions implemented to support people with cognitive disabilities while facing some difficulties deriving from their impairments (like, for instance, reading/writing difficulties, sequencing problems and long/short term memory impairments).

Marco Eichelberg, Andreas Hein, Felix Büsching and Lars Wolf. The GAL Middleware Platform for AAL

Abstract. GAL, the Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing, investigates how information and communication technology can provide for better environments for ageing. This paper describes a service oriented middleware platform for Ambient Assisted Living and its use in a number of different assistive systems developed in the GAL project: personal activity and household assistant, monitoring of preventive and rehabilitation sports, sensor-based activity determination, and sensor-based fall prevention and recognition. Besides a detailed description of the middleware platform and its elements and interfaces, central infrastructure services and their particularly applications in the different use cases are presented.

Ane Murua, Xabier Valencia, Eduardo Carrasco, Gottfried Zimmermann, Jürgen Bund, Bruno Rosa, Jan Alexandersson and Unai Díaz. Universally Accessible Task-Based User Interfaces

Abstract. This paper introduces a new AAL architecture intended to simplify and enhance the end user interaction with the technology. The proposed concept makes state-of-the-art task model technology available accessible to all type of users. The concept relies on the integration of both ANSI/CEA-2018 Task Model Description (CE TASK 1.0) and ISO/IEC 24752 Universal Remote Console Framework standards. Besides, a proof-of-concept implementation has been carried out which assist people in performing blood pressure measurements. Finally, a validation involving 8 elderly persons suffering from Alzheimer's disease has been carried out, obtaining encouraging results.

Martijn Bennebroek, Andre Barroso, Louis Atallah, Benny Lo and Guang-Zhong Yang. Deployment of Wireless Sensors for Remote Elderly Monitoring

Abstract. The FP6 project “Wireless Accessible Sensor Populations” (WASP) has developed an end-to-end infrastructure for the deployment and enterprise integration of wireless sensor nodes. The infrastructure is generic and allows for optimisation for a variety of applications by the development of dedicated services that can be distributed over (wearable and ambient) sensor nodes, the WSN gateway, and the enterprise (backend) system. Key to many applications, such as elderly care considered in this paper, is to optimise the battery lifetime of wearable sensor nodes that can be (remotely) customized to the monitoring needs of individual persons and to the quality-ofservice demands for offered services. The WASP infrastructure provides practical solutions for these targets and is being validated for realistic elderly care scenarios. These scenario’s aim to support elderly in (semi-) independent Ambient Assisted Living settings as well as to provide health workers with effective means of studying transient deterioration and behavior changes characteristic to the ageing population.

Instructions for authors

The paper, initial submission as well as camera-ready papers, must comply with the IEEE format (see IEEE template): double column, must not exceed 6 pages including all diagrams and references. All submissions must have names, affiliations and full contact details (including email addresses) of all authors.

Accepted papers will be published in IEEE Xplore and EI indexed as part of the conference proceedings.

Upon acceptance notice, authors must revise their paper according to the reviewers' recommendations and submit it to EDAS according to the procedure and deadlines described in the the intructions for authors published at the HealthCom web site. Note that registration to the HealthCom conference is required prior to uploading your paper to EDAS.

Deadline for author registration: May 15, 2010 see intructions
Camera ready version: May 1, 2010 May 28, 2010

General Chair

Program Committee Chair

Program Committee