Difficulties and missed targets. One missed target was the rather weak participation of international attendees. The choice of Frankfurt/Germany as one central European location was good for the international participants but still nearly all international projects with German partners sent their German delegates. Some invitees answered that they had planned to join the workshop but their companies limited the number of international business trips and so there were unable to participate. Of course in general a location in Germany encourages more interested persons from Germany than from other countries. While the participation from the academic side was very good, the participation from industrial side was limited. Most of the industrial middleware platforms invited refrained from joining the workshop ( Connected Living, IP Symcom, Qualcomm, Open Remote). The only exceptions were ProSyst and DTAG (Qivicon). Furthermore, the participation from standardisation bodies was also very weak. Although all relevant national and international actors had been invited, only the DKE joined the workshop. Since the DKE is one of the two German standardisation bodies active in this field and also supplies the convenor of IEC SG 5 “Ambient Assisted Living”, their participation was quite important. The major reason for the weak participation of standardisation bodies in general might be the fact that at this time AAL middleware is not the main focus of standardisation activities. During the discussion it emerged that the development of middleware in the M2M field has achieved significant progress. It might have been useful to specifically invite more actors from this field to participate. Nevertheless, ProSyst as one actor in M2M and AAL gave useful and valuable input on this topic.
