EvAAL, Evaluating AAL systems through competitive benchmarking, the experience of the 1st competition

As Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) emerges as a need for our ageing societies, many barriers are still in place against its wide adop- tion. One of the main issues related to the creation of an AAL market is the lack of consensus around well established technologies which should e ectively cover real needs of the population. EvAAL (Evaluating AAL Systems Through Competitive Benchmarking) is a newborn initiative aimed at evaluating solutions related to Ambient Assisted Living by or- ganizing annual international competitions. Its main objectives are the creation of a community of stakeholders around AAL and the creation of metrics and benchmarks for both innovative prototypes and commer- cial solutions. EvAAL focuses not only on comparison of algorithms or speci c hardware issues, but also of user acceptance, deployment and installation e ort, integrability, etc. In its rst versions, the competition is focusing on speci c technical aspects of AAL but aims, in the near future, at joining heterogeneous "ambient" technologies in a common evaluation framework. In July 2011, the rst EvAAL competition took place in Valencia, Spain, on Indoor Localization and Tracking for AAL. This paper describes how EvAAL is designed, its principles and how it is internally organized, and goes though an evaluation of this structure though the experience gained during the first competition.