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Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments
Thematic Issue: Evaluating Ambient Assisted Living Components and Systems
Submission deadline : March 15th, 2014
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Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a research theme that is motivated by socio-political issues deriving from the ageing population. It aims at improving the quality of life of the elderly, by increasing their autonomy in their daily activities, and by enabling them to feel secure, protected and supported. AAL systems integrate a number of ambient intelligence technologies (ranging from sensors and actuators to services and intelligent algorithms that support the integration of such services) and involve a number of activities that include sensing, acting, reasoning, interacting etc. These activities are generally implemented by a number of software components that, in turn, are incorporated into a number of devices spread in the environment, such as sensors, appliances, domotic devices, smartphones, etc. As a result AAL systems are complex distributed systems that make use of distributed middleware platforms to support communication and integration of the different components.

In this scenario, recognized evaluation methods are essential to compare different AAL solutions and to enable researchers to objectively assess the new state of art contributions. However, the complexity of AAL systems makes their assessment difficult, and the evaluation approaches tend to be subjective, piecemeal, or both. To ensure the validity and usability of the proposed systems, it is necessary to reach consensus on a set of standard evaluation methods. However, as a consequence of their intrinsic complexity, full AAL systems are hardly comparable, and, in fact, the evaluation of such systems is a challenging problem that is still far from being solved.
On this ground, the AALOA association (http://www.aaloa.org) has promoted the EvAAL competition (Evaluating Ambient Assisted Living systems and platforms, http://evaal.aaloa.org) that aims at advancing the state of the art in the evaluation and comparison of AAL platforms and architectures, with the ultimate goal of assessing the quality of life and autonomy granted to the users by such platforms. EvAAL aims at creating an environment where interested stakeholders can compare their solutions, and where the comparison of AAL systems may become feasible.
This Thematic Issue is promoted by AALOA with the objective of enhancing the results achieved by the EvAAL competition so far.

We encourage researchers and practitioners within the field of AAL, smart environments, and ambient intelligence to submit a contribution to this Thematic Issue. Note that, although EvAAL competitors are encouraged to submit their work, this Thematic Issue is not restricted to EvAAL competitors.

This Thematic Issue welcomes the submission of original works addressing components or services for AAL and their evaluation (with particular emphasis to the used evaluation methodologies, datasets and benchmarks used for the evaluation). The contributions must have not been previously published and should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere, however, proper extensions of preliminary papers appeared in conferences are also accepted. In the latter case we request the authors to refer their preliminary work in their submitted manuscript and to explain the main differences in the text and in the cover letter.

Topics Include but are not limited to:
- Localization/navigation systems suitable for AAL, based on different sensing modalities
- Activity recognition systems for AAL based on different sensing modalities
- Other components or services for AAL and their evaluation
- Creation and description of benchmarks for AAL components or services
- Creation and description of datasets for AAL
- Methodological papers that address the benchmarking and test methodologies for AAL

Submission Guidelines
Contributions should be formatted according to the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments (JAISE) guidelines (http://www.iospress.nl/journal/journal-of-ambient-intelligence-and-smart-environments/), and submitted on the JAISE submission site (http://www.mstracker.com/submit1.php?jc=jaise). Authors must clearly indicate in the cover letter their intention to submit their work to this Thematic Issue.

Contributions must strictly be of at least 15 pages, and, ideally, they should be no longer than 30.

Important dates
Submission deadline: March 15th, 2014
Notification: September 15th, 2014
Expected publication: May 2015

Guest Editors:
Dr. Stefano Chessa. University of Pisa
Dr. Juan Antonio Álvarez-García. University of Seville
Dr. Paolo Barsocchi. ISTI-CNR Institute