Internet of Things for Ambient Assisted Living: Challenges and Future Opportunities
Jie Wan, Xiang Gu, Liang Chen, Jin Wang · 2017
As the age profile of many societies continues to increase, supporting health, both mental and physical, is of increasing importance if independent living is to be maintained. Sensing, monitoring, recognizing activities of daily living, ultimately delivering immediate healthcare services has been perceived as a prerequisite for detecting the health status of the users. To date, extensive research been made in above-mentioned areas, which is frequently named Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). Recently, the term of Internet of Things (IoT) has been emerging, which emphasizes the interconnection of all available resources both physical and virtual with the purpose of collecting and exchanging data. Thus, IoT technologies have been widely adopted for the gathering of health related resources to provide reliable and effective healthcare services especially to elderly and people with chronic diseases. Thereby, the aim of this paper is to present a brief overview of IoT enabled AAL systems and application particularly in the healthcare domain, and then identify the existing challenges and future research opportunities in this field.