Coordinator Kurt Majcen has organized and chaired the workshop “How can regions get AAL operational?” for the AAL Forum 2016 in St. Gallen (Switzerland).
Introductory presentations “The need(s) of private care companies (SME) – what are their expectations on AAL?” (Mike Dorst, Dorst en partners), “Experiences from an AAL technology provider – Barriers and Success Factors to market entrance” (Raquel Sousa, IncreaseTime) , “How can pilots be of help?” (Lukas Roedl, AIT) and “Experiences from the AAL Pilot Region Salzburg” (Cornelia Schneider, Salzburg Research) were followed by discussions modeled after World Café principles. About 20 participants worked on the questions below and concluded with some answers:
- Is it still a matter of technology? What is missing?
- there is no good overview on a quite large number of interesting offers
- usability is often still an issue when approaching market
- integrated solutions are necessary
- clients would like to see personalized solutions based on their real needs
- How can (economically driven) bottom-up approaches look like? What are the stimulators?
- evidence regarding functionality and efficacy is required by care organisations
- end users expect reliable solutions
- single points of contact are necessary on regional level for achieving information
- SME want to be involved from the very beginning of projects
- How can we achieve representative samples in piloting projects and who is going to pay for that?
- the aim of pilots or test regions would be more statistical relevance than representativeness
- research questions determine the number of required test persons or households (30, 50, 70, 100…)
- funded AAL research projects can be more concerned with qualitative assessments; quantitative aspects are an interest of companies, as they want to make business with the products and services later on
