Context of caseIn Portugal, the integration of care services is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, a home support service called SAD (Serviço de Apoio Domiciliário—Domiciliary Support Service), provided by non-profit institutions to the elderly population is believed to be a first approach to integrated care.PurposeThe aim of this work is to describe and discuss the services provided by the institutions that participate in SAD and understand if this service is the first step in a change towards integrated care.Data sourcesThe main data sources were documents provided by institutions like INE (Instituto Nacional de Estatística—National Institute of Statistics) and a questionnaire that was submitted to 75 institutions in order to capture: (a) demographic and structural data; (b) the type of information that the professionals need to fulfil their jobs and (c) the kind of relationship and constraints, if they exist, to better integration, between the institutions that provide SAD and the patients, the social and health systems, and other entities.Conclusion and discussionSAD seems to have been promoting a formal collaboration between several entities in the social and health systems. The information shared between these institutions has increased, but where cooperation in care service provision is concerned this seldom surpasses the social bounds because health care is still difficult to integrate.

Objectives: The study reported in this article aimed to identify: (i) the most relevant applications supported by smart city infrastructure with an impact on the provision of healthcare; (ii) the types of technologies being used; (iii) the maturity levels of the applications being reported; and (iv) major barriers for their dissemination. Methods: A systematic review was performed based on a literature search. Results: A total of 44 articles were retrieved. These studies reported on smart city applications to support population surveillance, active ageing, healthy lifestyles, disabled people, response to emergencies, care services organization, and socialization. Conclusions: Most of the included articles were either of a descriptive and conceptual nature or in an early stage of development, which means that a major barrier for their dissemination is their lack of concreteness.

The active ageing paradigm aims to contribute to the expectation of a long, autonomous, independent and healthy life. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) promotes the development of technological solutions that might have a key role in not only the optimization of support services for older adults but also in the mitigation of their disabilities. This article presents a systematic literature review of how the impact of AAL technologies, products and services is being assessed in terms of its health-related outcomes. The main objective of this article is to contribute to the understanding of how state-of-the-art AAL solutions might influence the health conditions of older adults. The method used to conduct this systematic literature review followed the guidelines of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). The results show that the reviewed articles report not only the use of technological assessment instruments but also instruments to measure health-related outcomes such as quality of life.

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This study aimed to identify: (i) the relevant applications based on information technologies and requiring smart cities’ infrastructure to facilitate the mobility of older adults in URBAN SPACES; (ii) the type of data being used by the proposed applications; (iii) the maturity level of these applications; and (iv) the barriers TO their dissemination. An electronic search was conducted on Web of Science, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore databases, combining relevant keywords. Then, titles and abstracts were screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the full texts of the eligible articles were retrieved and screened for inclusion. A total of 28 articles were included. These articles report smart cities’ applications to facilitate the mobility of older adults using different types of sensing devices. The number of included articles is reduced when compared with the total number of articles related to smart cities, which means that the mobility of older adults it is still a not significant topic within the research on smart cities’. Although most of the included studies aimed the implementation of specific applications, these were still in an early stage of development, without the assessment of potential end-users. This is an important research gap since it makes difficult the creation of market-oriented solutions. Another research gap is the integration of knowledge generated by other research topics related to smart cities and smart mobility. Consequently, important issues (e.g., user privacy, data standardization and integration, Internet of Things implementation, and sensors’ characteristics) were poorly addressed by the included studies.

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