Ambient Assisted Living

I'm in Amsterdam for a meeting with AMD's CTO, Phil Hester, and various other Amdites. They're going to tell us about accelerated computing, stream computing, and manufacturing, and I guess we're going to ask them about delayed products, roadmaps, markets and TLB bugs.

But that's tomorrow. What's caught my eye today is Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), and not the sort of ambience by which Amsterdam assists one's living (although the night is yet young). AAL is the name for the e-health at home technologies I keep banging on about, the things that mean you can carry on with your life while the machinery watches out for that which need watching. It's aimed at people with progressive illnesses, especially cognitive ones, which will include most of us at some point. It means you can stay at home instead of having to be in care or under intrusive medical surveillance. The obvious next step is to watch healthy people for early signs of common problems, which gets them fixed far better - and cheaper.

Doesn't sound sexy? The economics say that this is the only way we'll be able to afford health care in the very near future, so it's good to see the field getting a proper name and starting to take itself seriously. And this will be huge - if you're looking for something to do for the next thirty years that'll be technical, remunerative and actually useful, I'd start thinking about working in it. There's a good story from E-Health Europe to get you started.