Ambient assisted living: a new field emerges

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is defined as "the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in a person's daily living and working environment to enable them to stay active longer, remain socially connected and live independently into old age". More broadly, AAL is an emerging multi-disciplinary field that combines medical technology and care technology within living environments to deal with twin demographic shifts—fast-growing needs of a rapidly aging population, and a shrinking pool of skilled workers to care for them. AAL systems are designed to personalize, adapt, and anticipate care needs in order to achieve a high quality, accuracy, reliability, security, usability, and interoperability of services.

The emergence of this field indicates that the century-long separation of public health from architecture and urbanism—which took place in the 1910s—may be coming to an end, as the two fields are wedded back together by connective technologies.