Navigating the Jungle of Assistance Systems: A Comparison of Standards for Assistance Functionality

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.