This article reviews advances during the past decade or so in telecare (ie, computersupported social care at home). The need for telecare is discussed along with how it relates to social and health care. The expected benefits of telecare are also discussed. The evolution of telecare technology is reviewed, covering various system generations. The capabilities of present day telecare are covered, along with its advantages, limitations, and barriers to uptake. Recent evaluations and exemplars of telecare are discussed. The user requirements for telecare are presented, complemented by a discussion of the issues in user and professional acceptance. The article concludes with a summary of past developments in telecare and the prospects for the future.

Feature interaction is a problem mostly considered in the context of telephony features, but present in other domains. In this paper we consider policies (independent of the system that they control) as an application domain for feature interaction techniques. We present the feature interaction problem as it occurs in the policy context and show how it can be approached. We give a taxonomy for policy conflict, and introduce a generic architecture for handling policy conflict.

The need for policies to control calls is justified by the changing face of communications. It is argued that call control requires distinctive capabilities in a policy system. A specialised policy language called APPEL (ACCENT Project Policy Environment/Language) has therefore been developed for this purpose. However the policy language is cleanly separated into a core plus specialisations for various application domains. The paper describes both the foundation and the call control ontologies. Sample policy examples are provided to illustrate use for call control. The paper also presents the policy system architecture in which the policy language is interpreted. The components of the policy system are described, particularly the policy server and the policy wizard.

Abstract. Home care systems need to be personalised to meet individual needs, and must be easily adjusted as the user's symptoms develop. Care policies (i.e. Event-Condition-Action rules) can be used to specify care services, facilitating changes in the behaviour of a home care system. Context modelling allows a user to specify the trigger and conditions of a care policy, using high-level context rather than raw sensor data. The actions of a care policy are, however, still dependent on the implementations details of actuators. We propose a framework that allows the actions of a care policy to be specified abstractly using human-understandable concepts. The framework takes care of discovering and using specific actuators, hiding the low-level home networking details from ordinary users. It therefore makes personalisation and modification of home care systems more accessible to ordinary users, requiring very little technical knowledge.

Abstract-It is argued that various factors including the increasingly ageing population will require more care services to be delivered to users in their own homes. Desirable characteristics of such services are outlined. The Open Services Gateway initiative has been adopted as a widely accepted framework that is particularly suitable for developing home care services. Service discovery in this context is enhanced through ontologies that achieve greater flexibility and precision in service description. A service ontology stack allows common concepts to be extended for new services. The architecture of a policy system for home care is explained. This is used for flexible creation and control of new services. The core policy language and its extension for home care are introduced, and illustrated through typical examples. Future extensions of the approach are discussed.