Are Active and Assisted Living applications addressing the main acceptance concerns of their beneficiaries? Preliminary insights from a scoping review

Abstract

Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies stand as a promising mean to respond to the big societal challenges related to health and social care. Nevertheless, despite their great potential and the recent boost ensured by the advances in Artificial Intelligence for data processing, the uptake in real-life settings of AAL technologies is still in its infancy. Several concerns seem to hinder the willingness of the targeted beneficiaries to integrate such technologies in their routines and living settings. Some studies and surveys have tried so far to identify and analyze these concerns and the factors that affect the immediate acceptance and long-term usage of AAL technologies, thus identifying accessibility, usability, privacy, safety, security and reliability as the core ones. Nevertheless, no attempts have been done yet to verify the reception of these analyses from a technological and implementation standpoint. This paper fills this gap by reporting the preliminary results of a scoping review of the AAL literature. The review investigates the solutions developed in the last five years that address various groups of beneficiaries and their concerns with respect to technology adoption. The results obtained aim to aid researchers, social and health care professionals, end users and technology providers understand the state of play of technological solutions, evaluation studies and the overall discussions that are appearing in the literature to address and respond to the end-users’ concerns.