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Abstract-The ever growing percentage of elderly people within modern societies poses welfare systems under relevant stress. In fact, partial and progressive loss of motor, sensorial, and/or cognitive skills renders elders unable to live autonomously, eventually leading to their hospitalization. This results in both relevant emotional and economic costs.Ubiquitous computing technologies can offer interesting opportunities for in-house safety and autonomy. However, existing systems partially address in-house safety requirements and typically focus on only elder monitoring and emergency detection. The paper presents ANGELAH, a middleware-level solution integrating both "elder monitoring and emergency detection" solutions and networking solutions. ANGELAH has two main features: i) it enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and ii) provides a solid framework for creating and managing rescue teams composed of individuals willing to promptly assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of ANGE-LAH, designed for a case study for helping elders with vision impairments, is developed and interesting results are obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed.

The arousal of emotion might have consequences for physical health is a broadly acknowledged idea. Therapy for depression, prevention for heart pathologies, and rehabilitation treatments for drug addiction are just a few examples of application domains that may benefit from technologies capable of monitoring, detecting, representing, and disseminating information pertaining to patients' physical and psychological/emotional states. However, the design and development of healthcare applications of this kind is a rather challenging issue that requires to integrate sensor infrastructures, which are able to detect changes in patients' physiological and emotional states, and of sharing this information to interested caregivers, such as professional medical staff, relatives, and friends. This paper proposes the Pervasive Environment for AffeCtive Healthcare (PEACH) framework, a middleware level support for affective healthcare that incarnates these ideas and describes its effective functions in a drug addiction treatment application scenario.

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