The incidence of cognitive impairment in older age is increasing, as is the number of cognitively impaired older adults living in their own homes. Due to lack of social care resources for these adults and their desires to remain in their own homes and live as independently as possible, research shows that the current standard care provisions are inadequate. Promising opportunities exist in using home assistive technology services to foster healthy aging and to realize the unmet needs of these groups of citizens in a user-centered manner. ISISEMD project has designed, implemented, verified, and assessed an assistive technology platform of personalized home care (telecare) for the elderly with cognitive impairments and their caregivers by offering intelligent home support services. Regions from four European countries have carried out long-term pilot-controlled study in real-life conditions. This paper presents the outcomes from intermediate evaluations pertaining to user satisfaction with the system, acceptance of the technology and the services, and quality of life outcomes as a result of utilizing the services.

This study follows ISISEMD through a phenomenological approach of investigating the experience of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) for someone with dementia. The aim is to accentuate the Assistive Technology (AT) from the end user perspective. This paper supports that older adults and those with dementia should no longer be an overlooked population and how the HCI community can learn from their experiences to develop methods and design interfaces which truly benefit their target population. Guidelines from previous research are incorporated along with eclectic, user-centered strategies as the interface designers for project ISISEMD develop appropriate and effective modalities.

Hotspot services will be offered in small, highly-populated public places like airports, hospitals, etc. They will play their assistive roles in the people's life only if they are secure, trusted, and nonobtrusive. Some of the challenges faced are the seamless operation between WLAN-based hotspots and other emerging wireless data networks technologies, for example body sensor networks; the exploitation of context-and location-aware information provided from the hotspot service; matching the user needs with differentiated services; preserving the privacy of the user's sensitive data and anonymity. To answer these challenges, a new solution for context-aware privacy protection for any type of fine-grained user sensitive data with profiles of the user, context, scenario and service is proposed. Based on assessment of current context and situation, the user delegates actions for protecting his privacy to the proposed mechanism that acts on his behalf. The discussed solution is presented with a medical scenario. Components model, interaction sequence, algorithm for privacy safeguarding and system implementation are described.

Sensor Networks (SNs) placed on human bodies and in the environment can intelligently and unobtrusively support professional teams (for example health care professionals) to improve their work and on the other hand their subjects (for example patients and elderly at hospital or at home). In pervasive healthcare settings, protecting the privacy of the medical care subjects and the medical staff is very important, because the lack of privacy may hinder the broad acceptance of pervasive health technology. Moreover, there is a need of empowering end-users with flexible personalized controls for their personal data collected, processed and communicated via SNs. The privacy protecting mechanisms must be non-obtrusive and context-aware to support the daily private and professional life of the persons. Since the devices/nodes used by patients and medical professionals will have diverse capabilities, many of them with very limited resources, an important question is the implication of the privacy protection mechanisms on the overall system performance. This paper proposes novel flexible privacy protection framework suitable for diverse set of ubiquitous applications; describes evaluation frames for it and investigates the cost of privacy protection. Evaluation of the influence of the context complexity and policy-based management is also presented.

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