Home-based Health and Wellness Measurement and Monitoring. Introduction to the Thematic Issue

Traditional healthcare environments are extremely complex and challenging to manage, as they are required to cope with an assortment of patient conditions under various circumstances with a wide range of resource constraints. Pervasive healthcare technologies seek to respond to a variety of these pressures by successfully integrating them within existing health care environments. This thematic issue focuses on the deployment of technologies at home which can have a positive impact on the health of our population, with a strong focus on technological developments aiming at increasing the health and wellbeing of those living at home from a variety of perspectives, for example, the collection and processing of ambient and spatialactivity datasets thought the usage of Body Area Network devices, the development and assessment of handheld mobile devices as part of the dementia screening process and finally the correlation and assessment of larger datasets through the development of data mining and simulation techniques. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) "is currently one of the important research and development areas, where accessibility, usability and learning play a major role and where future interfaces are an important concern for applied engineering. The general goal of ambient assisted living solutions is to apply ambient intelligence technology to enable people with specific demands, e.g. handicapped or elderly, to live in their preferred environment longer".