  The population of elderly people keeps increasing rapidly, which becomes a
predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and
cost-effective need to be sought. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a new
approach which promises to address the needs from elderly people. In this
paper, we claim that human participation is a key ingredient towards effective
AAL systems, which not only saves social resources, but also has positive
relapses on the psychological health of the elderly people. Challenges in
increasing the human participation in ambient assisted living are discussed in
this paper and solutions to meet those challenges are also proposed. We use our
proposed mutual assistance community, which is built with service oriented
approach, as an example to demonstrate how to integrate human tasks in AAL
systems. Our preliminary simulation results are presented, which support the
effectiveness of human participation.
