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

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

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

. 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-

The investigated standards are mostly also available in

English language.

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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-

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

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

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-

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

1 1

0 0 0

0 0

1 1 1

1 1

0 0 0

2 2

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.

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