Platforms for AAL applications

AAL - Ambient Assisted Living. When the topic "AAL" comes up, everybody thinks first of fascinating technology that is unobtrusively integrated in "smart home environments" and supports people in their daily lives. This thinking is surely be driven by the ongoing development of impressive services that was and is still provided by the AAL research community as well as the growing number of companies that bring these technology to market. In many projects - like MonAMI[14] - that deal with the integration of such mainstreaming services and sensor systems into a common architecture, it quickly became clear that a very important aspect was not sufficient considered: The need of a common platform for AAL systems. This paper is a summary of articles addressing this issue. Twenty highly qualified experts dealing with the standardization of AAL platforms for many years present their experiences to the topics like "Why platforms are important to AAL", "What features should be in a AAL platform" and "Why mainstream and open source solutions are important in AAL".