Can the Market Breakthrough in AAL be Achieved by a Large Scale Pilot?

Ambient Assisted Living is still on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough, even though the market potential is tremendous. As barriers to the success of AAL, (Wichert et al. in How to overcome the market entrance barrier and achieve the market breakthrough in AAL. Ambient Assisted Living. Springer, Berlin, 2012) mentions the lack of viable business models as well as the lack of ecosystems around common open platforms. Considering the fact that the EU has supported the development of universAAL as a true candidate for such common open platforms, this paper describes the next logical step towards the rollout of AAL throughout Europe based on this platform so that the foundation stone for the emergence of a self-organizing ecosystem is laid. In order to elaborate the feasibility of such rollouts, the European Commission published in early 2012 a CIP-ICT-PSP call for piloting AAL in large-scale based on interoperable platforms, where the winner was the proposal “make it ReAAL” that builds on universAAL as the common open platform. In addition to the applications coming with the universAAL Platform, the local vendors from each pilot region will offer their AAL products and services to the participating pilot sites. This means that a two-way adaptation is supposed to be addressed in ReAAL: on one hand, the universAAL native applications can be adapted to the requirements of the pilot sites, and on the other hand, the existing applications from the pilot regions can be integrated with the universAAL platform. Each Pilot site will then be able to select from this portfolio, those applications that are more suitable for their planned intervention. The mission of ReAAL is in this context to find out if the adaptation of a product to a common platform is economically reasonable when a company plans to enter the market with a new product idea. Based on this, ReAAL will hopefully show the cost-effectiveness of interoperable solutions compared to both vertical isolated solutions and comprehensive but closed systems. This should pave the way for the emergence of an ecosystem around a common open platform and based on that for the market breakthrough of AAL through interoperability.