Supporting Activities of Daily Living

This chapter has provided an overview of the technologies and applications involved within the domain of AAL. It has introduced the concept of ADL along with the concept of a smart environment and how technology can be applied to provide support in order to improve QoL for those that would normally require full time care or institutionalisation. A brief overview of the technology used has also been presented along with a comparison of the major techniques that can be applied to AmI, namely data, knowledge, and context driven approaches. Current methods of supporting ADL suffer from common problems such as the cost of retro fitting an environment along with the intrusiveness such an installation will incur. Other problems exist with current support of ADL such as the `cold start' problem were a large amount of data needs to be collected for pattern recognition through data mining, when the system is initially installed there is no data to be processed therefore support will not be available. A number of challenges that AAL faces have also been presented and discussed, such as those of multiple occupancy, future challenges include the personalisation of support to each individual occupants needs, Each occupants condition will deteriorate at differing rates therefore support will need to be tailored to the individual. These challenges will need to be addressed in the future if the vision of AAL is to be achieved in a real-world setting.