New Design Approaches in Ambient Assisted Living

Abstract

After reviewing some of the vast literature related to Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), we noticed that many of the recent solutions in AAL follow the design paradigm defined by the feeding machine presented in the famous Chaplin’s movie “Modern Times”. Despite all major advances in technology, the assisted person is still an “object”, and – in a pure industrial revolution approach - the design focus is on increasing the work productivity of the caregivers. In this brief discussion paper we propose a “third wave” approach on designing AAL systems: rather than creating technology to replace humans in assisting the elderly and disabled people, we should use technology to foster human interactions and enable more caregivers to get involved in this activity. According to this new, prosumerist, paradigm the producers and consummers of care should be able to switch roles. This paper outlines a possible implementation of a simple AAL system based on this paradigm. We also discuss a possible solution for the problem of activity recognition, based on distributed ANNs.