universAAL - AAL competition

The goal of universAAL is defining and implementing a reference architecture and platform for AAL applications that becomes widely accepted in the whole AAL community, and to define and realize on such platform a number of services that prove its validity and open business opportunities. To do that, it is essential that the universAAL architecture, platform, and services are supported by communities of different stakeholders (ranging from developers to industries, service providers, end users, etc.) that guarantee a development of universAAL even after the end of the project. For this reason universAAL implements tasks that realize specific community building strategies for different sets of stakeholders (such as tasks 8.1, 8.2, and 8.4). The EvAAL competition (Evaluating AAL Systems through Competitive Benchmarking), which is implemented in Task 8.5 and described in this deliverable, supports the community building activities. In fact, EvAAL has the role of expanding the community and attracting stakeholders around the universAAL architecture and platform. The evaluation and comparison of complex AAL systems is still far from being a reality, this implies that, at the present, the universAAL architecture and platform can hardly be compared with other solutions, and thus even the impact of new solutions and strategies to be adopted in the universAAL development can hardly be evaluated. EvAAL aims at advancing the state of the art in the evaluation and comparison of AAL platforms and architectures. In particular, one of the goals of the EvAAL competition is to generate an environment in which the researchers, students, and even industries can compare their solutions and exchange ideas on which such comparisons may become feasible. For this reason, EvAAL adopts a step by step approach, by dividing the problem into smaller pieces. First, it promotes competitions on specific topics in order to create a large data set and to create benchmarks and evaluation methodologies, then EvAAL will be able to evaluate and compare more complex (and even complete) AAL solutions. From the point of view of WP 2, 3, and 4, (development work package of universAAL) the creation of data sets, benchmarks, and evaluation methodologies, achieved by EvAAL, will become the mean to evaluate the quality of their findings, thus EvAAL results are also inputs for the validation work package (WP5). Moreover, EvAAL will also promote the use of the universAAL platform since it will base the benchmarking and evaluation of competing artefacts on the tools and platform developed in WP2 and WP3.