Requirements and metrics for location and tracking for ambient assisted living

Location and tracking services and technologies are becoming fundamental components for supporting healthcare solutions. They facilitate patients´ tracking and monitoring processes and also allow for better and long-term daily activity recognition. Various location and tracking services have been developed, over the last years, to provide real time localization for different applications. However, most of these services are not designed particularly to comply with all the requirements of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and, as a result, they reduce the viability of adopting AAL services as an alternative for continuous healthcare services. In this paper we set out the general requirements for location and tracking services for AAL. The requirements are extracted from a typical scenario of AAL. From the scenario, we define the requirements and also we identify a set of metrics to be used as evaluation criteria. If the identified requirements and metrics are adopted widely, potential location and tracking services will fit the real needs of AAL, and thus will increase the accessibility to AAL services by a larger sector of people. Moreover, in the paper, we evaluate two of the existing location techniques through the use of the proposed metrics. The aim is to asses to which level these solutions fulfill the identified requirements.