The ageing population of Europe is a well-documented phenomenon and there is general agreement that it has serious implications for all European citizens as well as for policymakers and politicians. The current paradigm of caring for elderly citizens in residential homes is becoming untenable and it is also unpopular with many elderly people themselves. New ways of caring which engage and empower older adults more actively, and are also more cost-effective, must be found.The four-year DREAMING elDeRly-friEndly Alarm handling and MonitorING project carried out randomized controlled trials across six pilot sites to assess the impact

Addresses an Emerging Shift in Developing CountriesThe authors and contributors of Ambient Assisted Living have recognized that the demographic profile is changing in many developing countries and have factored in an inversion of the demographic pyramid. The technology of ambient assisted living (AAL), supports the elderly and disabled in their dai

Prolonged life expectancy along with the increasing complexity of medicine and health services raises health costs worldwide dramatically. Whilst the smart health concept has much potential to support the concept of the emerging P4-medicine (preventive, participatory, predictive, and personalized), such high-tech medicine produces large amounts of high-dimensional, weakly-structured data sets and massive amounts of unstructured information. All these technological approaches along with “big data” are turning the medical sciences into a data-intensive science. To keep pace with the growing amounts of complex data, smart hospital approaches are a commandment of the future, necessitating context aware computing along with advanced interaction paradigms in new physical-digital ecosystems. The very successful synergistic combination of methodologies and approaches from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) offers ideal conditions for the vision to support human intelligence with machine learning. The papers selected for this volume focus on hot topics in smart health; they discuss open problems and future challenges in order to provide a research agenda to stimulate further research and progress.

This book presents the state of the art of Internet of Things (IoT) from the perspective of healthcare and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). It discusses the emerging technologies in healthcare services used for healthcare professionals and patients for enhanced living environments and public health. The topics covered in this book include emerging eHealth IoT applications, Internet of Medical Things, health sensors, and wearable sensors for pervasive and personalized healthcare, and smart homes applications for enhanced health and well-being. The book also presents various ideas for the design and development of IoT solutions for healthcare and AAL. It will be useful for bioengineers and professionals working in the areas of healthcare as well as health informatics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Ambient Assisted Living, IWAAL 2014, held in Belfast, UK, in December 2014. The 42 full papers presented with 12 papers of the workshop WAGER 2014 and 10 papers of a special session HTA were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The focus of the papers is on following topics: ADL detection, recognition, classification; behavioural changes, coaching and education; AAL design and technical evaluation; expression, mood and speech recognition; health monitoring, risk prediction and assessment; localization; and user preferences, usability, AAL acceptance and adoption.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Formal Methods, FM 2014, held in Singapore, May 2014. The 45 papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 150 submissions. The focus of the papers is on the following topics: Interdisciplinary Formal Methods, Practical Applications of Formal Methods in Industrial and Research Settings, Experimental Validation of Tools and Methods as well as Construction and Evolution of Formal Methods Tools.

Over recent decades, an abundance of reports have established that significant difficulties are experienced with the development of requirements in software projects. Traditionally, requirements are documented prior to development remaining fixed with little scope for subsequent change. However, for competitive domains, change to initial expectations frequently occurs and should be accommodated to increase the likelihood of project success. Agile Methods (AMs) recognise this, creating shorter development cycles and increased customer involvement, thus contributing toward higher levels of adaptability for changing requirements. However, despite widespread adoption, problems still remain as considerable difficulty exists in managing negotiation between interdisciplinary stakeholder groups. Specific problems include difficulty achieving a collaborative approach, early detection, and resolution of requirements conflict and limited access to suitable stakeholders also contributes toward developers not fully understanding the domain. In response to these challenges, this book has been written to address the inclusion of input from critical stakeholders on software development projects. This is achieved by utilizing Home Care Systems (HCS) as an exemplar for Dynamically Adaptive Systems (DAS), illustrating how AMs can be extended to better suit the desirable characteristics for an evolutionary Requirements Engineering (RE) approach to be developed. The findings from multiple studies, both academic and industry-based, inform the development of a novel evolutionary framework called OpenXP to improve the facilitation of agile requirements elicitation in complex business domains. OpenXP provides the Agile Business Analyst with a practical solution to the strategic consolidation of multiple diverse viewpoints in developing a representative perspective of the overall project goal. Specifically, this novel approach introduces a more participatory elicitation process, extending hands-on support for prioritization, decision making, and the provision of an informative workspace, including upper level business context needed for developing user stories. The OpenXP framework is a three-phased solution consisting of nine specific steps linked with four broader facets. Each facet is then responsible for implementing one or more strategic functions that comprise Stakeholder Coordination, Business and IT Alignment, Effective Communication, Adaptability Integration on agile software projects.