Assisted living in Smart Homes (SH) can change the way millions of the older people in Europe live, are cared, and manage their conditions and maintain wellbeing in the future. While today’s monitoring and assistance technologies are selectively deployed due to high cost, limited functionality and interoperability issues, future SH could leverage from cheap ubiquitous sensors, interconnected smart objects, packaged with robust context inference and interaction techniques.
With the increasing ageing population and the growing demand on novel healthcare models, research on SH for independent living, self-management and wellbeing has intensified over the last decade. Yet it still remains a challenge to develop and deploy SH solutions that can handle everyday life situations and support a wide range of users and care applications.
To best leverage the SH potential, ACROSSING envisions an easy-to-use technology infrastructure which provides validated technology components and platforms built upon them. The technologies in the infrastructure should be modular and extensible, and can be re-used and automatically configured and integrated in a service infrastructure to facilitate wider adoption.
ACROSSING aims to combine the efforts of a multi-disciplinary network of 26 leading European research groups, industry partners, and user organisations, to develop an open SH technology infrastructure and train 15 ESRs across sectors on concepts and methodologies of SHs towards the PhD. To achieve this, ACROSSING designs 15 topically complementary research projects covering the four core SH research areas, i.e. sensing, context inference, human system interaction and service based infrastructure, and four main SH application categories, i.e. independent living with cognitive impairments, self-management of chronic diseases, wellbeing and empowerment of the elderly.
The ACROSSING network brings together all required knowledge, skills, and stakeholders to offer a comprehensive training programme including industry practice and longer-term benefit in establishing cross-institutional PhD programmes and further partner collaborations. This will ensure that ACROSSING realises maximum scientific, societal, economic and human (ESRs and stakeholders) values, thus leading to far-reaching long-standing impacts beyond the network
Overall objectives:
The project aims to change the way millions of the older people in Europe live and maintain wellbeing. The project aims to make a critical contribution towards an open smart home technology infrastructure by interlinking disciplines from sensing technologies, context inferences and interaction and considering key principles of social impact, ethics, security and privacy.
Scientific target:
Develop technologies for smart-home based assisted living, including 4 specialised technology infrastructures, a shared experiment data repository and guidelines for smart home development based on best-practice demonstrators.
Training target:
Educate 15 ESRs in multi-disciplinary, transferable skills to become future research leaders in assisted living and create networks for future collaborations among partners.
Social target:
Increase European innovation capacity and competitiveness in smart home technology through the collaboration of industry and academia by integrating 4 ICT-driven application demonstrators as best-practice examples for the envisioned open SH technology infrastructure.
Conclusions:
ACROSSING has achieved all its deliverables, milestones, ESR recruitment, and ultimately all its scientific and training objectives.
