Ambient Assisted Living aims at providing assistance by allowing people with special needs to perform tasks which they have increasing difficulty with and to provide reassurance through surveillance in order to detect distress and accidental falls. Aged people are among the ones who might benefit from advances in ICT to live as long as possible in their own home. Voice-base smart home is a promising way to provide AAL, but even mature technologies must be evaluated from the perspec- tive of its potential beneficiaries. In this paper, we investigate which characteristics of the ageing voice that challenge a state of the art ASR system. Though in the literature, chronological age is retain as the sole factor predicting decrease in performance, we show that degree of loss of autonomy is even more correlated to ASR performance.