Preface

1.This thematic issue

This issue of JAISE is focused on the theme of Evaluating Ambient Assisted Living Components and Systems. The area of Ambient Assisted Livig (AAL) has grown steadily in the past decade; however, it is still to a large extent marked as ‘work in progress’ for which a lingering symptom is the lack of performance and evaluation standards.

This Thematic Issue focuses on the task of measuring the performance of systems in the area of AAL and on comparing the performance of these systems to other solutions which aim to achieve similar services by different means. This is more than finding out the system with the best performance - which in many cases is mostly anecdotic - but is actually about finding objective evidence that a specific technique has practical advantages over others to deal with specific problems in the area.

We wish to thank our colleagues Stefano Chessa (CNR-Pisa, Italy), Juan Antonio Alvarez García (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain) and Paolo Barsocchi (CNR-Pisa, Italy) for organizing the content of this issue. The editors have ample experience in this assessment exercises as they have been behind the organization of several EvAAL challenges focused precisely in this exercise of assessing performance in the specific area of Ambient Assisted Living.

As usual for an area active like AmI there are interesting events around the world. The last pages of this issue consist of a report on two successful vivas by Ph.D. students working in the area.

2.Upcoming issues

The following is the list of upcoming issues of JAISE:

More information on the call for papers to the future thematic issues is available on the webpage of JAISE at: http://jaise-journal.org/.