Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) offers possibilities for promising new IT-based health care services that are resulting in new challenges for its design process. We introduce a novel approach for engineering AAL services (AALSDA) which combines methods from service engineering and participatory design. We demonstrate this approach by developing and implementing an electronic data capture system, NuTrack, for self-reporting of nutrition status. The approach uses different concepts for AAL service design and delivery: service engineering for standardizing and structuring service processes, reasonable IT-support for automation of parts of services that need no person-toperson interaction, participatory design to integrate end-users in the development process, and patient integration for personalizing and improving the depth of performance of service providers' service delivery. For illustration, we present the case of chronic disease patients suffering from impaired fine motor skills. Our approach is applied in a pilot study with prototypes tested in focus groups and workshops with patients, caregivers and physicians. The results demonstrate good applicability and feasibility of the concept, and provide new insights for the future design, development and implementation of AAL services.

Self-reporting patient data are valuable feedback for medical treatment and care process, as well as for clinical trial studies and support of medical treatment. However, traditional paper-based medical patient longitudinal surveys or questionnaires for health and well-being status information are time-and cost-consuming, and may suffer from low patient compliance. Consequently, an NFC-based electronic data capture prototype called inSERT has been designed that allows quick and easy self-reporting for patients. inSERT allows patient monitoring enabling, electronic acquisition of well-being data right from the patient's home and real time representation of patient data, enabling direct medical intervention by physicians. The functional requirements for the inSERT system were determined through an extensive, user-centric elicitation process. We chose Near Field Communication (NFC) as a technology, for which the interaction paradigm is quick to learn and is intuitive, without prior knowledge being necessary; it is almost as simple as to fill out a paper-based questionnaire.Particularly for the target group (elderly people and people with impaired fine motor skills) -those who are not familiar with the use of mobile phones or computers -it makes NFC a very promising field compared to the control with touch based displays or computer mouse. The prototype is currently evaluated in a field test. The technical feasibility, implementation details, limitations and future research approaches are discussed in this paper.

We present an electronic data capture (EDC) system based on Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC is an easy way for self-reporting of health status information. As traditional paper-based questionnaires are time-and cost-consuming and may be affected by low patient compliance, our EDC system allows patient monitoring and electronic data acquisition directly from the patient's home. It enables real time representation and analysis of patient data and thus allows direct medical intervention by physicians. The results of a field test indicate that NFC is almost as simple as filling out a paper-based questionnaire. During the study patients used the prototype autonomously and with minimal errors. Further, NFC technology was perceived as very intuitive and the information quality of each patient's health status could be improved. Based on the findings we derive recommendations for future research and applications of NFC based electronic data capture systems.

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