Mixed Technical and Market Evaluation of Home Automation Netowork for AAL Solutions.

The demographics are experiencing an elderly population growth. One of the main concerns, due to this growth, is the cost of elderly care which is rapidly rising. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has been proposed as a solution for independent ageing in place, reducing the care costs and improving the quality of life of the elderly. Alongside with the benefits like tele-care, health monitoring, and assistance in activities of daily living, ambient intelligence in smart homes offers another important service which is home control. The right choice of the home automation (HA) technology is crucial for an effective home control. This is challenging in a dynamic and competitive HA market with several standards and alliances. A long-term investment on an HA solution requires not only technical evaluation but also a market evaluation of existing technologies and an understanding of how it will be shaped in future. In this work we searched for mixed technical and market indicators in order to evaluate HA technologies and base our smart home platform on it.