The Lower Saxony research networkdesign of environments for ageing: towards interdisciplinary research on information and communication technologies in ageing societies
Reinhold Haux, Andreas Hein, Marco Eichelberg, Jens-E. Appell, Hans-Jürgen Appelrath, Christian Hippolyt Bartsch, Thomas Bisitz, Jöerg Bitzer, Matthias Blau, Susanne Boll, Michael Buschermöhle, Felix Büsching, Birte Erdmann, Uwe Fachinger, Juliane Felber, Tobias Fleuren, Matthias Gietzelt, Stefan Goetze, Mehmet Gövercin, Axel Helmer · Informatics for Health and Social Care · 2010
Worldwide, ageing societies are bringing challenges for independent living and healthcare. Health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare and sensor-enhanced health information systems offer new opportunities for care. In order to identify, implement and assess such new information and communication technologies (ICT) the 'Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing' (GAL) has been launched in 2008 as interdisciplinary research project. In this publication, we inform about the goals and structure of GAL, including first outcomes, as well as to discuss the potentials and possible barriers of such highly interdisciplinary research projects in the field of health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare. Although GAL's high interdisciplinarity at the beginning slowed down the speed of research progress, we can now work on problems, which can hardly be solved by one or few disciplines alone. Interdisciplinary research projects on ICT in ageing societies are needed and recommended.