Navigating the Jungle of Assistance Systems: A Comparison of
Standards for Assistance Functionality
Bastian Wollschlaeger and Klaus Kabitzsch
Chair of Technical Information Systems, Technische Universit
¨
at Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany
Keywords:
Health Smart Home, Assistive Technology, Design of Assistance Systems, Ambient Assisted Living,
Digitalized Health, Interoperability.
Abstract:
Health Smart Homes offer assistance capabilities and facilitate the shift towards individual, precise health care.
However, due to the variety of patient requirements and the enormous amount of existing solutions, the manual
engineering of customized assistance systems becomes infeasible. By further automating this design approach,
a customization of home-based assistance systems can be facilitated. In order to enable an automated design
approach of assistance systems for home-based health care, a common functional vocabulary needs to be
agreed upon. This paper proposes a literature-based categorization of established assistance functions and a
literature comparison based on these categories to facilitate standardization of assistance functions. Therefore,
we analyze standards and experience reports to identify and categorize the most common assistance use cases
and functions. The results show that there is no single standard defining the most common assistance functions,
which hampers communication and impedes the design process of health smart homes. To mitigate this effect,
we envision a building block-based definition of a common vocabulary for assistance functions.
1 INTRODUCTION
Residential environments are becoming more and
more equipped with technical devices, which renders
them smart and promises support of our daily life.
This also extends to the health of the residents a
specific area of research are ambient assisted living
(AAL) systems, which aim at providing a good sup-
port for health and well-being. This is not only limited
to acute health care delivery, but also includes sup-
porting healthy living (Maeder and Williams, 2017).
The patient’s home as an area of health care provi-
sioning (Haux et al., 2016) receives increasing at-
tention, as more e-Health and telemedicine applica-
tions become available to improve the quality of care
(Kruse et al., 2017) and bridge the distance between
patient and health care providers using information
and communication technology (ICT) (Otto et al.,
2018).
In the future, a shift from one-size-fits-all health-
care approaches to customized precision health care is
predicted (Maeder and Williams, 2017). In the con-
text of patients’ home environment, this is often re-
ferred to as Health Smart Home (HSH) (Maeder and
Williams, 2017). However, in order to benefit from
a tailor-made assistance system in HSHs, patients,
health care providers and technicians face with com-
plex challenges in selecting the appropriate compo-
nents and products. There is a great variety and num-
ber of possible assistance technology solutions; yet
they are not always compatible with each other. Fur-
thermore, the resulting assistance systems need to be
adapted to the individual requirements of the patients
as much as possible, which puts major emphasis on
customization (Meyer et al., 2015).
As a consequence, both patient and health care
provider are tangled up in navigating the confusing
jungle of assistance solutions, trying to find suit-
able solutions and to combine them to one work-
ing system. Professional planners often limit the
selection of solutions to a small number of well-
known components, which prevents the integration
of new technologies or devices. To end this strug-
gle, an automated computer-based approach might of-
fer decision-support in selecting and connecting assis-
tance components to a customized assistance solution
for patients’ homes.
We envision such a design approach that takes
both the patient’s requirements and needs into account
and comes up with several suggestions that fulfill the
individual demand for technical support of the pa-
tient. Referring back to the jungle comparison, this
Wollschlaeger, B. and Kabitzsch, K.
Navigating the Jungle of Assistance Systems: A Comparison of Standards for Assistance Functionality.
DOI: 10.5220/0007397903590366
In Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2019), pages 359-366
ISBN: 978-989-758-353-7
Copyright
c
2019 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
359
Functional View
Components / Materialization ViewRequirements View
Assistance System
Assistance Function
Abstract Assistance
Concept
<realizes
>
use cases and single functions are mentioned
User Requirement
Patient / Resident
Health Smart Home
Assistance Use Case
Condition Portfolio
Assistance
Component
<consists
-of>
<consists-of>
<realizes
>
<additionalReq
.>
<implements>
Figure 1: Assistance concepts in Health Smart Homes - context and terminology.
approach would act as a navigation system, prevent-
ing the user from getting lost in the jungle of assis-
tance systems.
Every navigation system needs both a map and
path-finding-algorithms. Therefore, an automated de-
sign approach also requires a representation of the
available assistance solutions (i. e. the surrounding
and world map) as well as a method on how to appro-
priately combine them (i. e. a path-finding-algorithm).
In this paper, we propose a categorization of as-
sistance functions, which was derived from a liter-
ature analysis of established assistance systems and
use cases. This serves as the first step in charting the
existing world of assistance solutions and providing a
formal documentation of component functionality to
enable an automated design approach.
The goal of our research presented in this paper is
to guide the consolidation of functional semantics in
the field of ambient assisted living technologies in or-
der to provide the foundation for an automated design
approach for HSH systems. The main contributions
of this paper are:
1. Development of a categorization of common as-
sistance functions
2. Consolidation of different standards and guide-
lines for home-based assistance systems of HSHs
3. Comparison of the existing standards and guide-
lines by identifying their specific focus areas
The remainder of the paper is organized as fol-
lows: The next section introduces key concepts that
are used by this paper in the context of HSHs and ex-
plains their relationships. Subsequently, an overview
of related literature and the state of the art for model-
based design approach of automation systems in the
domestic environment is presented, before outlining
the overall research roadmap. Section 3 describes the
applied method and the analyzed literature. The re-
sults of the analyzis are presented in Section 4 and
discussed in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes
the paper and describes further research actions.
2 BACKGROUND
2.1 Context of Health Smart Homes
Assistance systems in HSH are embedded in a special
context as displayed in Figure 1.
The central concept of this paper is the Health
Smart Home (HSH). It is an extension to the smart
home concept that describes living space equipped
with communicating devices to monitor the surround-
ing and the residents as well as controlling the phys-
ical environment. In addition, HSHs add a strong fo-
cus on the residents’ health status. It needs to be man-
aged and must therefore be measured and understood
(Maeder and Williams, 2017).
HSH system deployment is based on integration of
existing components (Welge et al., 2015; Haux et al.,
2016). Yet, even though off-the-shelf technology can
be used, there is a significant workload for system
integrators (Welge et al., 2015) since HSH systems
combine devices of a variety of types (telemedicine,
building automation, ICT, proprietary solutions) and
from different vendors.
The equipped electronic devices of HSH are Assis-
tance Components that constitute an Assistance Sys-
tem in the HSH. The individual assistance compo-
nents of an assistance system may exchange informa-
HEALTHINF 2019 - 12th International Conference on Health Informatics
360
tion by communicating with each other. They realize
specific Assistance Use Cases, which might be com-
plex and specific scenarios (e. g. larger subsystems
specifying an installation location). As an assistance
system consists of assistance components, the assis-
tance use case realized by the whole assistance system
can also be determined.
With different prefabricated components being
combined, interoperability issues need to be taken
into account. Interoperability amongst system com-
ponents is usually low and needs to be determined
manually by an experimental setup for each compo-
nent pair, as formal specifications of the component
semantics are missing. Integration issues are men-
tioned as future challenges (Maeder and Williams,
2017). Similarly, interoperability and data integration
have also been identified as one of the main techni-
cal issues in modern and future health-enabling and
ambient assistive technology (Haux et al., 2016).
The Resident of the HSH determines the require-
ments the assistance system has to fulfill. On the one
hand, residents may suffer from several diseases or
special conditions thus, a specific Condition Port-
folio can be associated to each resident. This im-
plies several User Requirements the assistance system
should be able to fulfill. On the other hand, residents
may have additional user requirements that are not re-
lated to a specific disease, but should nonetheless be
fulfilled by the assistance system in the HSH.
2.2 Views on Health Smart Homes
The concepts related to the resident constitute the Re-
quirements View on the HSH, while assistance sys-
tem and assistance components represent the Compo-
nents / Materialization View. A key task in HSH engi-
neering is finding and selecting appropriate assistance
components, such that the assistance system is able to
fulfill the whole set of requirements.
More fine-grained Assistance Functions as
smaller functional units of potentially complex
assistance use cases are used in the mapping of
assistance components and user requirements to
enable detection and avoidance of unnecessary re-
dundancy. While an assistance use case might involve
complex interactions of several components (such as
a fall detection system that is integrated with home
care service providers via wireless communication
technology), assistance functions focus on individual
aspects of assistance use cases. For the introduced
example, the assistance use case of the integrated
fall detection system consists of several assistance
functions: First, the fall detection based on measured
sensor data and second, the communication with
the home care provider via wireless communication
technology.
The distinction of use cases and functions is as
follows: Assistance use cases represent specific sce-
narios that may contain several interacting assis-
tance functionality, whereas assistance functions rep-
resent individual functionality. Both assistance func-
tions as well as assistance use cases are often de-
scribed with technology-specific realization restric-
tions e. g. which communication technology will
be used. However, user requirements are mainly
focused on providing a certain functionality, with-
out prescribing how exactly this functionality has to
be implemented by the assistance system. Thus, a
technology- and manufacturer-independent model for
assistance functions is needed. In order to increase
reusability, the structural elements of assistance func-
tions are defined in an abstract manner as Abstract
Assistance Concepts. These abstract assistance con-
cepts are modular and reusable building blocks for
specifying the Functional View on the HSH. On a
technology-neutral level, assistance functions can be
described using the abstract assistance concepts and
their interactions.
Consequently, the abstract assistance concepts are
the missing link for a formal mapping of requirements
and assistance components.
2.3 Related Literature
The functional view of HSHs is important when try-
ing to map assistance components with user require-
ments, since it offers a technology-neutral formaliza-
tion level for computer-based design algorithms.
There are different approaches for specifying func-
tional models of automation components. For medi-
cal information technology solutions, use case-based
integration profiles have been applied to model more
complex scenarios (Welge et al., 2015). These pro-
files specify individual complex scenarios and their
actors, but no modular building blocks and thus do
not scale well with an increasing number of assistance
solutions.
For room automation systems, a similar approach
is taken by the German standard VDI 3813 (VDI
3813-2, 2011), which specifies standard room au-
tomation functions. It uses a textual as well as a func-
tion block-based representation of this common func-
tional vocabulary of the room automation domain.
For each function, the required inputs and available
outputs are semantically specified. This standard is
also the foundation for a semantic component reposi-
tory (Dibowski and Kabitzsch, 2011), which contains
functional representations of room automation com-
Navigating the Jungle of Assistance Systems: A Comparison of Standards for Assistance Functionality
361
1) Generation Abstract Design
2) Computation of Detailed Designs
Detailed Designs
Abstract DesignRequirements
Lighting
Switch Light
Automatic Light
HVAC
Heating
Ventilation
Component
Repository
1) Generation Abstract Design
2) Computation of Detailed Designs
Functional
Detailed Designs
Functional
Abstract Design
Requirements
(functional, non-functional)
Lighting
Switch Light
Automatic Light
HVAC
Heating
Ventilation
Shading
Non-functional
Devicerepository
Figure 2: Automated Design Process based on (Dibowski
et al., 2010).
ponents.
Using this component repository, a multi-stage
automated design approach for room automation sys-
tems could be developed (Dibowski et al., 2010;
Lehmann et al., 2016). Figure 2 depicts the differ-
ent stages of the approach. It applies the functional
models from the component repository to match the
requirements specified by room automation planners
as abstract designs in the common functional vocab-
ulary the VDI 3813 offers. As a result, several design
suggestions are generated (detailed designs).
The VDI 3813 as a common vocabulary is a vi-
tal part of the approach as it offers a standardized
language for specifying both the system functionality
(abstract designs) and components’ semantics (com-
ponent repository).
2.4 Research Roadmap
This section explains the overall context of the re-
search and puts the contributions of this paper into
perspective with regards to the bigger picture.
Since the manual design of HSHs is suffering
from a high complexity, the design process needs to
be automated. As the automated design approach dis-
cussed above (Dibowski et al., 2010) has proven ef-
fective for room automation, it should be investigated
if its principle can be transferred to the HSH domain.
This would require components of the smart home
and assistance systems domains to be semantically
modeled in a similar way as proposed by Dibowski
and Kabitzsch (Dibowski and Kabitzsch, 2011).
Therefore, a formal and technology-neutral mod-
eling framework for the components’ functions sim-
ilar to the VDI 3813 is required in order to specify
the functional view on HSHs. Thus, this paper in-
vestigates if there are comparable standard functions
available for assistance systems of HSHs by analyzing
available literature with a strong focus on standards
and guidelines.
3 METHOD
After introducing the main concepts and their rela-
tions, the method applied when analyzing existing lit-
erature of assistance systems is introduced in this sec-
tion. Firstly, the literature selected for the analysis is
presented before providing a detailed description of
the used method of analysis.
3.1 Analyzed Literature
To identify common assistance functionality, estab-
lished standards were identified and analyzed. Since
the overall approach follows the general idea of the
German standard VDI 3813 and the results should be
compatible to the existing classification of standard
functions in the room automation domain, the search
for standards was focused on German standardization
bodies
1
. Furthermore, restricting the analysis to Ger-
man standards can be justified as AAL technology has
been a major research focus in Germany. Besides sev-
eral federal and state ministries, the German Federal
Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) offered
the research programme AAL Ambient Assistive
Technologies” from 2008 to 2012. In total, 54 re-
search projects were funded (Meyer et al., 2015).
The search for relevant standards and guidelines
concerning assistance functionality yielded the fol-
lowing results:
VDI 3812-1 “Requirements for electrical installa-
tions and building automation and control sys-
tems”: This standard is focused on “support-
ing the selection of home automation technology
and the concrete implementation” (VDI 3812-1,
2010). It lists 21 assistance functions and use
cases for domestic environments.
VDI 6008-3 “Barrier-free buildings Aspects of
electrical installation and building automation”:
This particular standard is part of a series of stan-
dards focusing on barrier-free buildings. This part
describes “ways how technical building services
can reduce barriers, increase safety and enhance
convenience” (VDI 6008-3, 2014). In total, 84
distinct assistance use cases are mentioned.
VDE-AR-E 2757-8 “Process support for the techni-
cal implementation of assistant systems (ambi-
ent assisted technology) in homes and residential
buildings”: This VDE application guide focuses
on assistance functions for different components
of residential buildings as well as their suitabil-
ity for different user groups (VDE-AR-E 2757-
1
The investigated standards are mostly also available in
English language.
HEALTHINF 2019 - 12th International Conference on Health Informatics
362
8, 2014). It lists 51 assistance functions and use
cases in domestic environments.
As the literature analysis was focused on assis-
tance systems, the standard VDI 3813 (VDI 3813-2,
2011) of standard room automation functions has not
been taken into account. However, as mentioned in
Section 5, it is used to assess the results of the litera-
ture analysis.
The results of the search for standards and guide-
lines were supplemented with an evaluation report
on practical usage of assistance technology in vari-
ous settings (Meyer et al., 2015). Out of 59 projects,
Meyer and colleagues investigated the most relevant
17 projects in detail with regard to the used assistance
systems and lessons learned from their application.
A total of 45 assistance functions and use cases have
been identified.
All in all, the analyzed literature offers a combi-
nation of prescriptive as well as descriptive sources.
Thus, it covers both the theoretical and practical as-
pects of assistance solutions and indicates how rele-
vant theoretical assistance functions are in practice.
3.2 Method of Analysis
The literature-based analysis of common assistance
functions is done in two steps. The first step, Compi-
lation and Consolidation, is collecting the assistance
functions and more complex use cases mentioned in
the literature. Afterwards, the assistance use cases
need to be decomposed by deriving the assistance
functions contained in the use cases. The identified
functions are then added to the overall list of assis-
tance functions. This resulting list is subsequently
consolidated by eliminating duplicates and harmoniz-
ing the functions’ naming.
In the second step of the analysis, Categorization,
the functions are categorized in a mixed approach of
deductive and inductive categorization. First, knowl-
edge of the general structure of assistance systems
in HSH is used to derive an initial coarse classifica-
tion of assistance functions. The identified assistance
functions are classified according to the initial cate-
gorization. Subsequently, they are iteratively grouped
to more fine-grained categories and consolidated sim-
70
20
7
4
0
20
40
60
80
1 2 3 4
Figure 3: Histogram of the number of sources an assistance
function is mentioned in.
Taxonomy of Assistance Functions:
Smart Home
Comfort
Comfortableness
Operating
Energy Efficiency
Demand-based
Operation
Visualization
Communication &
Multimedia
Assistance Systems
Accessibility
Usability
Adaptability
Supportive (w.r.t.
Strength)
Safety & Security
Protection of
Health
Fire and Average
Protection
Intrusion
Protection
Room
and Building
Automation
Lighting
Heating
Shading
Air Conditioning
Sensor Operating Contoller Actuator
VDI 3813
Domain Group Subgroup
Figure 4: Resulting categorization of assistance functions.
ilar to the assistance functions from the first step. The
final set of categories is then hierarchically structured.
4 RESULTS
4.1 Assistance Functions
The first step of the method presented in Section 3.2
yields a consolidated list of assistance functions men-
tioned in the literature. At the end of the con-
solidation step, 101 assistance functions were iden-
tified in total. Several assistance functions were
mentioned in multiple sources, including Automatic
Light (dimmable)”, “Closed-loop room temperature
control”, “Scene Control”, “Central off”, Automatic
Shutdown”.
Figure 3 displays the histogram of how often func-
tions have been mentioned. It can be seen that nearly
70 % of the identified assistance functions are men-
tioned in only one out of four sources. Additional
20 % of the functions are also referred to by just two
sources. Given that all sources claim to focus on the
Navigating the Jungle of Assistance Systems: A Comparison of Standards for Assistance Functionality
363
3
25
5
6
15
3
2
5
19
13
20
9
8
2
3
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Comfortableness
(Cmf)
Operating (Op)
Demand-based
Operation (DbO)
Visualization (Vis)
Communication &
Multimedia (C&M)
Usability (Usbl)
Adaptability (Adpt)
Supportive (Sppt)
Protection of
Health (PoH)
Fire and Average
Protection (FAP)
Intrusion
Protection (IntP)
Lighting (Ltg)
Heating (Htg)
Shading (Shd)
Air Conditioning
(AC)
Smart Home Assistance System Room & Building Autom.
Figure 5: Resulting sizes of the function categories. The subsequently used abbreviations for the categories are shown.
same area assistance functionality in domestic en-
vironment, but 90 % of the assistance functions are
defined in up to only two literature sources, it can be
concluded that the amount of overlap amongst the dif-
ferent literature sources is surprisingly low.
Even though the standards and guidelines target
the same area, the results suggest that they might em-
phasize different aspects. As a consequence, neither
of the standards or guidelines seems to offer a com-
prehensive view on assistance functions, but they all
have to be considered at the same time. In this case,
30 % of overlap introduces the risk of redundancy and
conflicting definitions, which hampers communica-
tion between professionals in this field
2
.
4.2 Categories of Assistance Functions
Figure 4 depicts the resulting categorization of the
consolidated assistance functions. It has to be noted
that some assistance functions may fit into more than
one category as their functionality may be reused in
different application contexts.
The three closely interrelated domains Smart
Home, Assistance Systems and Room and Building
Automation represent the top level of the categoriza-
tion. The categories of each domain are further di-
vided into different groups. For smart home as well
as room and building automation, these groups corre-
spond to the different trades (i. e. “Lighting”, “Heat-
ing”, “Shading”, Air Conditioning”, “Communica-
tion & Multimedia”) or goals (i. e. “Comfort”, “En-
2
Since (Meyer et al., 2015) is a report on actual prac-
tical usage of assistance systems and it does not claim to
offer a comprehensive view on assistance functionality, it is
not suitable for assessing how fragmented the definition of
assistance functions is.
ergy Efficiency”). In the analyzed standards, only a
small number of functions from the room and build-
ing automation domain have been identified. There-
fore, these categories are not subdivided any further.
However, the smart home categories comfort and
energy efficiency can be subdivided. Comfort can on
the one hand be achieved by assistance functions that
make residents feel comfortable or cozy (“Comfort-
ableness”). On the other hand, comfortably “Oper-
ating” appliances and technical equipment may con-
tribute to the overall comfort level of inhabitants.
Functions for energy efficiency can be both ensuring a
“Demand-based Operation” of household appliances
as well as building systems and providing a “Visual-
ization” of the energy consumption and device states.
The categories belonging to assistance systems
can be divided into “Accessibility” and “Safety & Se-
curity”. Accessibility contains the categories “Us-
ability”, Adaptability”, and “Supportive” function-
ality and aim at reducing barriers in daily life at
home. Safety functions are divided into “Protec-
tion of Health” as well as “Fire and Average Protec-
tion” (e. g. in case of malfunctioning household appli-
ances). The major application for security functions
is “Protection from Intrusion”.
4.3 Focus Areas of the Literature
The distribution of the 101 identified assistance func-
tions in the different categories is shown in Figure 4.
As assistance functions may be assigned to different
categories, the overall amount of items in all cate-
gories adds up to 135. The cardinality of the different
categories is shown in Figure 5 and depicts the focus
areas of the selected literature as a whole.
The room and building automation domain is
HEALTHINF 2019 - 12th International Conference on Health Informatics
364
0
2
0
1 1
0 0 0
5
2
3
1
0 0 0
1
7
0 0
4
0 0
2
0
2
5
3
0 0
11
2
1 1 1
3
1
0
6
3
4
1 1
0
1
0
3
1 1
7
0 0 0
3
2 2
1
4
1
0
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Cmf Op DbO Vis C&M Usbl Adpt Sppt PoH FAP IntP Ltg Htg Shd AC
Smart Home Assistance System Room and Building Automation
VDI 3812-1 VDI 6008-3 VDE-AR-E 2757-8 Meyer et al. 2015
Figure 6: Profile of categories of unique assistance functions in the literature.
mentioned several times; however, it is not in focus
of the assistance functions of the analyzed literature.
This might be due to the focus of the literature search,
which concentrated on the assistance aspects of home
automation, while room and building automation are
mostly concerned with providing an automation in-
frastructure for buildings and their technical equip-
ment. The most important categories are “Operat-
ing” in the “Comfort” group (25 items), followed by
“Intrusion Protection” (20 items) and “Protection of
Health” (19 items), which both are part of the “Safety
& Security” group. “Communication & Multimedia”
(15 items, Smart Home domain) as well as “Fire and
Average Protection” (13 items, “Safety & Security”
group) are also important categories.
Specific focus areas of the different literature can
be identified. Figure 6 depicts the profiles of the
unique functionality for each literature source. In the
smart home domain, the standard VDI 6008-3 and
the experience report of Meyer and colleagues (Meyer
et al., 2015) feature the most unique functions in the
areas of “Operating” comfort and “Communication &
Multimedia”, respectively. In terms of assistance sys-
tems, each literature source contributes some unique
assistance functionality to the categories of “Safety
and Security”.
As a summary, a focus on the domains smart home
and assistance systems can be identified. Assistance
functions of the assistance systems domain are most
commonly used for safety and security purposes, in-
cluding health care and detection of health risks, de-
tection of safety issues related to the equipment of
the apartment as well as preventing intrusion. On the
other hand, smart home assistance functions focus on
providing a higher usage comfort with support of op-
erating tasks. A second focus of smart home func-
tions is enabling communication with friends, family,
neighbors, and practitioners as well as providing ac-
cess to multimedia content.
5 DISCUSSION
The results presented in the previous section revealed
that the domains room and building automation, smart
home as well as assistance systems overlap and are
closely linked. In case of room and building au-
tomation, the identified assistance functions need to
be consolidated and supplemented by the already
existing standard room automation functions of the
VDI 3813 Part 2. As a means for aligning the stan-
dards, the different trades of room automation might
be used, so that the assistance functions discussed for
HSH can be mapped to the respective room automa-
tion functions.
The standard VDI 3813 is of vital importance for
automated design approaches in the room automa-
tion domain, since it defines a common vocabulary of
standard functions used by professionals. But, as can
be seen from Figure 3 and Figure 6, for assistance sys-
tems there is no single standard that can be used as a
normative reference for standard assistance functions.
Each of the investigated literature sources contributed
an important and unique set of assistance functions to
the overall list of functions. However, this also means
that, unlike in the room automation domain, there is
no agreed-upon set of assistance functions that might
serve as a common vocabulary for practitioners, tech-
nicians, patients, or patient advisors. Instead, they
need to resort to a number of standards and guide-
lines when discussing assistance functions, creating
the potential for misunderstandings due to redundant
or contradicting definitions. These drawbacks would
be overcome by a single combined standard, which
however is hard to keep up-to-date.
Following the approach of the VDI 3813, the def-
inition and standardization of modular and reusable
building blocks for home-based assistance systems
may be a viable approach to tackle the issue of the
great variety of assistance functions, whose defini-
tion is spread over a number of different standards.
The Abstract Assistance Concepts introduced in Sec-
Navigating the Jungle of Assistance Systems: A Comparison of Standards for Assistance Functionality
365
tion 2.2 are such building blocks. They can be derived
from the identified assistance functions.
With reference to the jungle navigation system,
we have identified that there are several incomplete
maps of the world, which are not yet ready to serve
as an input for the path-finding-algorithms. As a
consequence, we suggest consolidating the different
types of objects on maps (i. e. the building blocks of
world maps) as a common vocabulary for map cre-
ation. Based on this vocabulary, it will be possible
for domain experts to create a consistent view of the
world as input for automated path-finding-algorithms.
6 CONCLUSION
This paper investigated existing standards for assis-
tance systems in the context of HSHs, which have the
potential of facilitating precise health provisioning in
the future. Since the design of such systems is com-
plex, model-driven design automation was discussed
as a promising approach to cope with the great num-
ber of possible components to select as well as the
interoperability and customization requirements.
To enable such an automated design approach
based on formalized functional models, a common
vocabulary and categorization of assistance functions
were proposed. It was identified that there is no single
standard for specifying such a common vocabulary of
functions, resulting in the need to align with standards
of adjunct domains and to identify modular, reusable
building blocks of assistance systems.
These open research topics need to be addressed in
order to apply automated design approaches to HSHs
and overcome the design issues hampering a success-
ful application of assistive technology for improving
quality of care.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work for this paper was funded by the European
Social Fund and the Free State of Saxony (Grant no.
100310385). The authors would like to particularly
thank Dr. Hannes Schlieter for the encouragement to
investigate this topic. We would also like to offer spe-
cial thanks to Lena Otto and Tuan Linh Mai as well as
the junior research group Care4Saxony for their valu-
able feedback on the manuscript.
REFERENCES
Dibowski, H. and Kabitzsch, K. (2011). Ontology-based
device descriptions and device repository for build-
ing automation devices. EURASIP J. Embedded Syst.,
2011:3:1–3:17.
Dibowski, H., Ploennigs, J., and Kabitzsch, K. (2010).
Automated design of building automation systems.
57(11):3606–3613.
Haux, R., Koch, S., Lovell, N. H., Marschollek, M.,
Nakashima, N., and Wolf, K.-H. (2016). Health-
enabling and ambient assistive technologies: Past,
present, future. Yearb Med Inform, Suppl. 1(Suppl
1):76–91. 27362588[pmid].
Kruse, C., Krowski, N., Rodriguez, B., Tran, L., Vela, J.,
and Brooks, M. (2017). Telehealth and patient sat-
isfaction: a systematic review and narrative analysis.
BMJ Open, 7:1–13.
Lehmann, M., Mai, T. L., Wollschlaeger, B., and Kabitzsch,
K. (2016). Reducing component selection complexity
by component aggregation using design criteria. In
IECON 2016 - 42nd Annual Conference of the IEEE
Industrial Electronics Society, pages 7095–7100.
Maeder, A. J. and Williams, P. A. H. (2017). Health smart
homes: New challenges. Studies in health technology
and informatics, 245:166–169.
Meyer, S., Heinze, R. G., Neitzel, M., Sudau, M., and
Wedemeier, C. (2015). Technische Assistenzsysteme
f
¨
ur
¨
altere Menschen - eine Zukunftsstrategie f
¨
ur die
Bau- und Wohnungswirtschaft. Wohnen f
¨
ur ein langes
Leben/AAL. Abschlussbericht. Forschungsinitiative
Zukunft Bau. Fraunhofer Irb Stuttgart.
Otto, L., Harst, L., Schlieter, H., Wollschlaeger, B., Richter,
P., and Timpel, P. (2018). Towards a unified under-
standing of ehealth and related terms proposal of a
consolidated terminological basis. In Proceedings of
the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedi-
cal Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 5:
HEALTHINF, pages 533–539. INSTICC, SciTePress.
VDE-AR-E 2757-8 (2014). Ambient assisted living (aal)
- process support for the technical implementation
of assistant systems (ambient assisted technology) in
homes and residential buildings.
VDI 3812-1 (2010). Home automation technologies - re-
quirements for electrical installations and building au-
tomation and control systems.
VDI 3813-2 (2011). Building automation and control sys-
tems (BACS). room control functions (RA functions).
VDI 6008-3 (2014). Barrier-free buildings - aspects of elec-
trical installation and building automation.
Welge, R., Busch, B.-H., Kabitzsch, K., Laurila-D
¨
ursch, J.,
Heusinger, S., Lipprandt, M., Eichelberg, M., Eichen-
berg, E., Engelien, H., G
¨
ok, M., Moritz, G., Hein, A.,
and Dutz, T. (2015). AAL-Onto: A Formal Represen-
tation of RAALI Integration Profiles. In Wichert, R.
and Klausing, H., editors, Ambient Assisted Living: 7.
AAL-Kongress 2014 Berlin, Germany, January 21-22,
2014, pages 89–102. Springer International Publish-
ing, Cham.
HEALTHINF 2019 - 12th International Conference on Health Informatics
366