Promises and Challenges of Ambient Assisted Living Systems

The population of elderly people keeps increasing rapidly, which becomes a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. Ambient assisted living (AAL) is a new approach which promises to address the needs from elderly people. Ambient intelligence technologies are widely developed in this domain aiming to construct safe environments around assisted peoples and help them maintain independent living. However, there are still many fundamental issues in AAL that remain open. Most of the current efforts still do not fully express the power of human being, and the importance of social connections and social activities is less noticed. Our conjecture is that such features are fundamental prerequisites towards truly effective AAL services. This paper reviews the current status of researches on AAL, discusses the promises and possible advantages of AAL, and also indicates the challenges we must meet in order to develop practical and efficient AAL systems for elderly people. In this paper, we also propose an approach to construct effective home-care system for the elderly people.