AALISABETH: Home environment cooperating to health assessment

In order to keep the pace with the demographic trends, health services all over the world are shifting from care to prevention paradigms. Technology can speed up the implementation of healthy-aging and aging-at-home policies, but need to second the same shift: in this work, the design and implementation of a prevention-oriented, ambient-assisted-living environment is introduced. The AALISABETH (Ambient-Aware LIfeStyle tutoring for A BETter Health) project, a 2M€ project partially funded by INRCA (Italian National Institute of Health and Sciences on Aging) and by Regione Marche, targets the healthy elderly population. These participants are free from severe illness or impairments but are considered at risk of endemic age-related diseases such as diabetes or hypertension. Such pathologies are often related to bad lifestyle habits, and most notably to unhealthy food intake and to poor physical exercise. Clinical monitoring of such risk conditions involves the use of physiological sensors (e.g., measuring blood pressure, or glycaemia): despite the availability of inexpensive models, regular checkups are often missed due to boredom or lack of motivation. AALISABETH aims at integrating such information with lifestyle-related information; it may provide a less intrusive, yet comprehensive and effective, way to monitor health status.