Evaluating AAL systems through competitive benchmarking indoor localization and tracking

It is with great pleasure that we present this book, which summarizes the expe- rience and results of the first EvAAL Competition. EvAAL aims at promoting a new approach to the evaluation and assessment of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems and services, based on competitive benchmarking. In fact, the evaluation of AAL systems is a rather complex task, which will challenge re- searchers for years to come, due to their inherent complexity, but, on the other hand, this evaluation is paramount for the assessment of research results in this area. The approach promoted by EvAAL is to establish and refine over the years suitable benchmarks and evaluation metrics that are tried out on the field every year during the competition. The results of the competition are then discussed in a final workshop that is also the premise for the subsequent competition. In this respect, EvAAL represents an excellent opportunity to bring together different communities and research teams to work together on challenging and open problems, to evaluate various approaches, and to envision new research opportunities. To deal with all such tasks while meeting the complexity of AAL systems, EvAAL proceeds gradually: the initial aim is to focus on the evaluation of AAL components, and only when methodologies, benchmarks, and criteria have be- come mature, will it move its focus towards services and complete systems. In 2011, EvAAL focused on the problem of localization and tracking for AAL, as this is a key component for achieving context awareness. Recent years have witnessed an increasing trend of location-based services and applications. In most cases, however, location information is limited by the accessibility to Global Nav- igation Satellite Systems (GNSS), largely unavailable for indoor environments. To this end much research has been done in many research communities (in particular, sensor networks and ubiquitous computing communities) to provide techniques for localization and tracking in smart environments, and this EvAAL competion was aimed especially at those communities. The competition was organized in two major events. The first event was the actual competition, which took place in Valencia, on July 25-29, 2011. During this event, the competitors were given 3 hours of time each to install, test, and uninstall their systems. The second event took place in Lecce on September 26th. This was the final workshop (hosted by the AAL Forum), where the competitors and organizers finally met and discussed the outcome of the EvAAL competition. The first EvAAL winners were also announced on this occasion. The first two contributions in this book, written by members of the organi- zation committees, describe the organization and technical aspects of the com- petition, while the other contributions, written by the competitors, provide a complete technical description of the competing artefacts and report on the ex- perience lessons learned by the teams during the competition.