Open minds

Healthy and active ageing is one of the main challenges for most industrialised nations and a key issue on Europe's agenda for the period 2014-2020. The number of people aged 60 and over in the {EU} is now rising by more than two million every year. This raises the question of how to transform this challenge to our societies into a driver of economy and create a win-win situation? One of the envisioned solutions is the application of assistive technology combined with newly created services to allow people to live an independent life for as long as possible. Research in this area involves many {ICT} related {R&D} disciplines and has attracted much attention in the last couple of years. Several initiatives have emerged to tackle the challenges involved, and significant incremental progress has been made on many fronts. But a major breakthrough, leading to a standardised approach and thereby to widespread adoption, is still not in sight. One of the main problems from the technological point of view is fragmentation. The mission of {AALOA}, the {Ambient Assisted Living Open Association}, is to address this situation by bringing together the resources, tools and people involved in {Ambient Asssisted Living (AAL)} in a single forum that makes it much easier to reach conclusions on provisions needed to achieve progress. A concrete technical objective is to promote a common platform or middleware that is distributed as open source software