What Characterizes Safety of Ambient Assisted Living Technologies?

Ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies aim at increasing an individual's safety at home by early recognizing risks or events that might otherwise harm the individual. A clear definition of safety in the context of AAL is still missing and facets of safety still have to be shaped. The objective of this paper is to characterize the facets of AAL-related safety, to identify opportunities and challenges of AAL regarding safety and to identify open research issues in this context. Papers reporting aspects of AAL-related safety were selected in a literature search. Out of 395 citations retrieved, 28 studies were included in the current review. Two main facets of safety were identified: user safety and system safety. System safety concerns an AAL system's reliability, correctness and data quality. User safety reflects impact on physical and mental health of an individual. Privacy, data safety and security issues, sensor quality and integration of sensor data, as well as technical failures of sensors and systems are reported challenges. To conclude, there is a research gap regarding methods and metrics for measuring user and system safety in the context of AAL technologies

Runtime safety models in open systems of systems

Upcoming application domains, from ambient assisted living to car2car, show the need for openness, flexibility and safety in next generation embedded systems. Whilst there are several approaches tackling the dynamic reconfiguration and integration of components, there has not been much research done on safety of such systems. As many of the application domains are inherently safety critical this hinders open systems of systems to unfold their full potential. Models at runtime have shown to foster dynamic adaptation of software systems. In a similar way, the integration of appropriate runtime safety models and dynamic evaluation mechanisms into systems seems to be a viable approach to enable safety management at runtime. In this paper we sketch out our modeling approach for adaptive ad hoc systems and present first results with respect to the integration and usage of safety models at runtime