Ambient assisted living proposes solutions based on information and communication technologies to enhance the quality of life of people who need assistance at home. It promotes the development of infrastructures and services for the independent or more autonomous living, through the integration of information and communication technologies in homes and residences, thus increasing their quality of life and autonomy and reducing the need for external assistance. A natural and critical human need, where ambient intelligence can be used, is healthcare. In such a domain, secure mobile and ubiquitous systems can be used to improve the quality of life of people. Although research in environmental intelligence used in health applications is gaining momentum, it has not yet reached a level of maturity. The reasons for such deficiency include not only the challenges of understanding the health domain by computer scientists, but also the difficulty of dealing with a critical domain, where errors are unacceptable.

This special issue is aimed at boosting this area of research, focusing not only on the innovations in infrastructure and technology needed to achieve the ambient intelligence in assisted living and health, such as smart environments and wearable and mobile medical devices, but also on the development of novel testing, verification, and evaluation techniques to enable the effective and secure implementation of such innovations. We invite authors to submit original research and review articles that address these challenges.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Activity recognition systems through wearable and mobile devices
• Behaviour analysis in ambient assisted living environments
• Context-awareness in assistive environments
• Data analytics for health environments
• Health, wellness, and secure disease monitoring through mobile systems
• Knowledge management for health: context, behavior, and user modeling
• Learning tools for handicapped people
• Mobile and ubiquitous health
• Mobile solutions for active ageing, social integration, and self-care
• Monitoring of chronic and nonchronic diseases in ambient assisted living
• Physiological data acquisition system based on mobile computing
• Security and privacy in ambient assisted living
• Sensing, data management, and big data in ambient assisted living
• Use of mobile technologies in the health domain
• Smart homes for ambient assisted living