2013

Isomursu, Minna; Wallin, Arto; Pikkarainen, Minna; Jaring, Päivi

In recent years, there has been strong pressure to restructure health- and wellness-related services into new forms to promote quality of life, people's well-being, and the way we live best with those who need care - such as ageing adults or others with special needs. Digital services are increasingly used as one enabler to support people in everyday life so that they could lead healthier lives in their own homes. There has been a great deal of R&D&I effort put toward developing solutions for ambient assisted living (AAL) to support older adults' living independently in their own homes, telemedicine solutions to provide clinical health care at a distance, etc. However, taking up of these digital opportunities has not yet reached a level matching the expectations set. One way of exploring the barriers to adoption of digital services in the care domain is to look at commercialisation challenges in this context. Commercialisation of technology, often explored in the realm of technology transfer, has commonly been recognised as risky and often failing [1]. Especially in the domain explored here, commercialisation process is challenging because the institutional health-care service infrastructures are well established and difficult to change, and the ambient assisted living market is a relatively new market that lacks common standards and regulation.