Building a Mutual Assistance Living Community for Elderly People

The population of elderly people is increasing rapidly, which becomes a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought to provide services required by an ever increasing number of users. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a new approach which promises to address the needs of elderly people. Ambient Intelligence technologies are widely developed in this domain aiming to construct safe environments around assisted peoples and help them maintain independent living. However, there are still many fundamental issues in AAL that remain open. Most of the current efforts still do not fully express the power of the human being, while the importance of social connections and social activities is less noticed. Our conjecture is that such features are fundamental prerequisites towards truly effective AAL services. In this chapter, we firstly review the current status of researches on AAL, discuss the promises and possible benefits , while also indicating the challenges we must meet in order to develop practical and efficient AAL systems for elderly people. Afterwards we propose an approach to construct effective home-care systems for elderly people. We use service oriented architecture (SOA) to orchestrate the available resources inside the community, organizing services from both human side and assistive devices. Such a “mutual assistance community” can also serve as a platform to introduce intergenerational activities. The younger generation could help the elder generation on physical challenging tasks, while the elderly people could also provide their valuable experience in problem solving, which may greatly assist the younger ones at work, in study, etc. In so doing, social connections and inclusion are enhanced, generation gaps are narrowed, and the elderly people may find new stimuli to live more active lives, while societal resources may be utilized more efficiently and more effectively. Our researches are laying out the foundation to build up a mutual assistance community to assist the elderly people aging well. We have taken thorough analysis and perspective over such a community. We have sketched a clear vision of building the community. The needed technologies have been investigated, challenges of building such a community have been reviewed, some prototypic solutions have been designed, and preliminary researches on organizing services inside the community have been done. The next step of our research is to call for wide collaborations from industrial, academic and governmental bodies to bring this proposed mutual assistance community into actual implementation.