Ambient Assisted Living: Home Care J.UCS Special Issue

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) proposes solutions based on Information and Communication Technologies (ITC) to enhance the quality of life of older people. AAL promotes the provision of infrastructures and services for the independent or more autonomous living, via the seamless integration of info-communication technologies within homes and residences, thus increasing their quality of life and autonomy and reducing the need for being institutionalized or aiding it when it happens (See: According to the European Union, up to 19 Million persons give primary assistance with daily activities to their elderly or dependent relatives. Moreover, most people prefer to live independently in their own homes. However, formal care services are in many cases indispensable and, in this way, ICT-based solutions can enable and sustain older adults to continue managing their daily activities in their homes. Thus, this edition focuses on " Home Care " solutions for elderly according with the 5th call of AAL Joint Programme. This manuscript is the preface for the special issue entitled " Ambient Assisted Living: Home Care " which gathers the selected papers from the public call for papers opened during Autumn 2012 and from a selection of papers of the 4th International Work-conference on Ambient Assisted Living (IWAAL 2012), held in Vitoria-Gasteiz, December 3-5, 2012. The scientific committee of the conference selected the best papers addressing Home Care on Ambient Assisted Living after the conference based on marks scored by chairmen and referees. The extended versions of these papers and the papers received from the open call were collected to additional rounds of peer reviews. The most scored papers have been included in this special issue, covering topics such as novel systems and processes to treat diseases (e.g. obesity), tele-mobile-monitoring, rapid development of tele-medical solutions, multi-agent solutions for people monitoring , mobile-based activity recognition, virtual and augmented reality solutions. More specifically, Jaime Guixeres, et. al., in the manuscript entitled " Effects of Virtual Reality during Exercise in Children " have analyzed how virtual reality may