Special Issue on Ambient Assisted Living and Robotics

Submission Deadline: 1 September 2014
Publication: May/June 2015

By 2050, the number of older persons (over the age of 65) could exceed the number of young people for the first time in history, causing governments worldwide to further prioritize elderly care. For instance, in Europe, the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) program and the forthcoming Horizon 2020 program offer incentives to researchers, developers, and industrialists to put forward new ideas on how to deal with the consequences of an aging population.

Many of the latest solutions being devised are increasingly sophisticated, with some deployed in assisted living environments, such as nursing homes. In industrialized countries, more work focuses on the use of intelligent and highly interactive systems for improving quality of life.

The main aim of this special issue is to report on the present status of science and technology in its quest to develop intelligent solutions for AAL. Particular emphasis is on integrated solutions that make use of multiple sensors, both stationary and mobile (robotic platforms, for instance). Robotics is to be read in the broad sense of automatic and intelligent solutions, encompassing both hardware and software solutions.

The topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to

Applications of AAL (technologies, tools, and systems), such as:
- Innovative solutions of robotics in health and social care,
- Intelligent sensors,
- Smart homes and smart objects,
- Technologies to support healthy living and social inclusion,
- Smart public spaces to support activities such as travelling or shopping,
- Technologies for emotional and psychological well-being,
- Digital assistants and support platforms for dementia sufferers, and
- Long term monitoring and assessment.

Methods and techniques:
- Social robotics,
- Human-Robot interaction,
- Computer vision solutions for AAL,
- Agent solutions for middleware,
- Information fusion architectures, systems, and algorithms for heterogeneous multi-sensor arrays,
- Machine learning solutions for AAL, and
- Big data solutions for very large volumes of sensor data.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be 3,000 to 5,400 words (counting a standard figure or table as 200 words) and should follow IEEE Intelligent Systems style and presentation guidelines (www.computer.org/intelligent/author). The manuscripts cannot have been published or be currently submitted for publication elsewhere.

We strongly encourage submissions that include audio, video, and community content, which will be featured on the IEEE Computer Society Web site along with the accepted papers.

Guest Editors
- Dorothy N. Monekosso, The Robot Vision Team, Kingston University
- Paolo Remagnino, The Robot Vision Team, Kingston University
- Francisco Florez, Digital Imaging Research Centre, Kingston University