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Most of the industrialized countries are facing a new situation which is the increasing number of elderly people and the enormous cost of associated healthcare. IT-based homecare services have been proposed as a solution to alleviate this problem. However, the adoption of the homecare services is hindered by the fact that there are many heterogeneous IT solutions, which prevent interoperability and integration of existing as well as future applications. Service-Oriented Architecture and its advantage of service composition in a looselycoupled manner are being considered as a promising approach to promote interoperability. In this paper, we explain our motivation for and understanding of a generic service-oriented homecare platform. We consider the SOA paradigm and its idea of logical separation of concerns to define a service realization and composition framework and to identify its challenges in order to realize and compose the homecare services. Using our framework, we evaluate three academic homecare projects to see how they address the identified challenges. The work presented in this paper helps researchers to understand the state-of-the-art of homecare-related platforms and technologies; and to outline issues for further research in the homecare domain.

This special issue is ambitious in that it calls for strategic transformation in research on Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and related dementias, including innovation in both research design and value delivery, through lifestyle interventions that implicitly relate to a much broader range of comorbidities and diseases of aging. One response to this challenge is to venture beyond the boundaries of research that supports the healthcare industry. Toward this end, we introduce opportunities for research translation and knowledge transfer from NASA to the healthcare industry. Our intent is to show how NASA's approach to research can guide innovation for a smart medical home, most notably for AD and other diseases of aging. The article is organized in four major sections: (a) aggregating fragmented research communities; (b) lifestyle interventions in the medical home; (c) multiscale computational modeling and analysis; and (d) lifespan approach to precision brain health. We provide novel motivations and transformative paths to a diversity of specific lines of research, across communities, that would be difficult to discover in common methods of networking within research communities and even through sophisticated bibliographic methods. We thus reveal how knowledge transfer between the public and private sector can stimulate development of broader scientific communities and achieve a more