This chapter illustrates the different disciplinary design challenges of smart healthcare systems and presents an interdisciplinary approach toward the development of an integrative Ambient Assisted Living environment. Within the last years a variety of new healthcare concepts for supporting and assisting users in technology-enhanced environments emerged. While such smart healthcare systems can help to minimize hospital stays and in so doing enable patients an independent life in a domestic environment, the complexity of such systems raises fundamental questions of behavior, communication and technology acceptance. The first part of the chapter describes the research challenges encountered in the fields of medical engineering, computer science, psychology, communication science, and architecture as well as their consequences for the design, use and acceptance of smart healthcare systems. The second part of the chapter shows how these disciplinary challenges were addressed within the eHealth project, an interdisciplinary research project at RWTH Aachen University.

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In the study we explore how users evaluate new selfservice applications for mobile phones. The application under examination is a passenger information system for public transport. The study is part of an interdisciplinary project (Cairo, context aware intermodal routing) and investigates two questions: How do users evaluate the communicative usability of novel applications? Which characteristics are relevant and how does the knowledge about already established communicative patterns, means and services influence their judgements?To explore the users' expectations and mental models user tests were conducted with two groups: younger and older participants. The results show that new applications have to be analysed against the background of established multi-media networks. Within this networks, different media and communicative formats get the status of key solutions and reference objects. Thus, self-service applications as part of media networks require a terminological, structural and visual harmonization.

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Within industrialized countries healthcare systems currently change to cope with the upcoming consequences of the demographic change. One of the most serious challenges is the maintenance of the area-wide supply chain of medical care despite the threatening shortage of physicians. In this context, telemedical services for communication between doctors and patients gain in importance. Crucial for the success of such electronic services is the choice of the medium, which must be appropriate for this special purpose of use and, finally, accepted by its users. In this paper, an exploratory survey was conducted to detect acceptance motives of five different media (face-to-face, telephone, videophone, video conference, interactive wall) in two different usage situations. 103 respondents participated (17-83 years). Findings show that for the standard case, a face-to-face consultation is still highly preferred compared to any telemedical applications. For emergency situations, participants' attitudes change: A telephone consultation was similarly well accepted than face-to-face communication. As the most comfortable service a face-to-face-consultation was corroborated, followed by the videophone consultation.