397 Home Care Technologies for Ambient Assisted Living Ratko Magjarevic University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia Abstract— Health technology and increased medical knowl- edge enable accurate diagnostics and effective treatment of a large number of diseases, including those which only a decade ago were not easy to manage and cure. The interest and bio- medical research in the modern society is intensively directed on disease prevention, early diagnostic and life quality im- provement as well as on development of personalized health- care especially for those chronically ill, disabled and for the aging population. The aim of the new approach in healthcare is not only to monitor and improve health of individuals, but also to increase their independence, mobility, safety and social contact through increased communication, inclusion and par- ticipation using available technologies. A large number of new medical devices for health monitoring, home care, wellness promotion, gerontotechnology, etc. have to be designed, tested and adopted to meet the special needs and demands of differ- ent population groups. These new devices for telemonitoring and telediagnostics create large amount of health related in- formation, in most cases from sensors organized into body sensor networks. The information has to be processed, trans- mitted from the point of care to the healthcare system in a safe way and after managing the information in an appropriate and intelligent manner, decisions related to the persons health are to be made. This paper brings an overview of some solutions presented in literature as well as our own development of intelligent mobile monitoring devices. Keywords— Personalized healthcare, ambient assisted liv- ing, body area network, telemonitoring, telediagnostics I. INTRODUCTION The average age of the population is increasing consid- erably, especially in the developed countries. In order to meet the rising demand for health care and other social services for the elderly, the policy makers have decided to encourage a number of research and development projects which combine enabling possibilities of communications, information technology, sensorics and health education. Due to ageing of population, the prevalence of chronic diseases has increased and at the same time the citizens have extended their demands for the best available health care. The life style, increased stress and workload tend to increase the disease risks in middle aged and younger popu- lation and therefore a need for developing disease prediction and early detection programs and devices has risen in order to increase the quality of life and reduce the costs by pro- viding as many as possible services at citizens home [1, 2]. Both, patients and healthy, are prepared to carry different intelligent and networked sensors continuously in order to improve their health and well being. Such wearable devices must comply with many requirements, in addition to their medical functionality and technical specifications: they have to be easy to use, reconfigurable, interoperative [3]. Physio- logical parameters are measured and processed by body sensor networks often based on e-textiles [4, 5, 6], transmit- ted to the immediate surrounding such as wristwatch, PDA, or PC [7]. The information may be collected and processed in a medical institution, or at their home. In some cases telemonitoring is covered by global GPS or GIS [8]. The ambient has been adopted by embedding sensors into smart homes in order to provide health monitoring of individuals, and also to increase their independence, mobility, safety and social contact through increased communication, inclusion and participation using available technologies [5, 9, 10]. Smart homes require integration of a large number of sen- sors and device monitoring with a set of processing and decision making devices resulting with a large number of different applications [11]. The concept of ambient assisted living has been created within EU FP6 as a program for funding research and de- velopment with outcomes that enhance the life quality of the elderly and of the old primarily by using ICT innova- tions and by providing remote services. This program shall be continued until at least 2013. The citizens’ acceptability of e-Health services is rising worldwide and e.g. the expec- tations for the EU are that by 2010 up to 5% of the health budget will be spent on these services [12]. II. FROM HOME CARE TO PERSONALIZED HEALTH CARE Patients do not any longer receive care only in medical facilities. The health care services have spread first to their home and then also to other spaces they reach, and finally there is a tendency to offer the services universally. Also the number of users and potential users has increased since in addition to the need for monitoring either vital functions of patients or their general health status, the wish for continu- ous information on health status and potential health risks have developed in healthy population also. Health care technology research and development have followed these