Project description
Privacy protection for active and assisted living services
The ageing population represents a crucial health and social challenge with relative economic impacts due to the increasing provision of care. The innovation introduced by Active and Assisted Living (AAL) solutions addresses social and healthcare demands while taking advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the Silver Economy. However, some of these solutions make use of smart cameras, raising concerns over privacy protection. The EU-funded visuAAL project aims to address the gap between users’ requirements and the adequate and safe use of video-based AAL technologies to deliver supportive care to older people. The project will increase insight and understanding of the ethical, legal, privacy and societal issues of visual systems installed in hospitals, homes and community sites to improve older adults' protection.
Objective
Europe is facing crucial health and social care challenges due to the demographic shift towards an ageing population and related economic impact from increased provision of care. Innovation in Active and Assisted Living (AAL) solutions has the potential to address these healthcare and social demands while profiting from the economic opportunities driven by the Silver Economy. Advances in computer vision have given video cameras the ability of ‘seeing’, evolving their functionality to become ‘smart cameras’. However, the monitoring using cameras can be seen as intrusive and violating rights to privacy, because of the concern that raw video images could be observed by unauthorised viewers or stored for inappropriate use. Acceptance of such technologies is also low because they create a sense of Orwellian “Big Brother” surveillance.
The aim of VISUAAL is to bridge the knowledge gap between users’ requirements and the appropriate and secure use of video-based AAL technologies to deliver effective and supportive care to older adults managing their health and wellbeing. VISUAAL will seek to increase awareness and understanding of the context-specific ethical, legal, privacy and societal issues necessary to implement visual system across hospital, home and community settings, in a manner that protects and reassures users; outputs will stimulate the development of a new research perspective for constructively addressing privacy-aware video-based working solutions for assisted living. This aim will be achieved by providing a transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral combination of training, non-academic placements, courses and workshops on scientific and complementary skills. This holistic training to high achieving early stage researchers will be facilitated by the consortium, a community of researchers and industrial partners from different fields (computer science, engineering, healthcare, law, business, sociology) and other stakeholders (users, policy makers, public services
Fields of science
- social sciencessociologygovernancepublic services
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensorsoptical sensors
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrytransition metals
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputer vision
- social scienceslaw
Keywords
Programme(s)
Coordinator
03690 Alicante
Spain