Prognostic of feature interactions between independently developed pervasive systems

Statistics show an aging trend in the world population, which will progressively overload existing health systems. Therefore, we believe that ubiquitous computing will play an important role in domicile settings, coping with the growing need for automated home healthcare support, especially for the sick and elderly. The integration of independently developed off-the-shelf systems (e.g., health-monitoring, entertainment, communications, home automation, etc.) may cause unplanned interactions between them (cf. feature interactions). This is a major concern since the correct/expected behavior of an isolated system may not be the same when deployed in conjunction with other systems, causing interferences, i.e., unexpected outcomes or misbehaviors. The Safe Home Care project tackles this problem to pursuit the safe deployment and reconfiguration of home healthcare smart-spaces. We propose the use of state graphs to represent off-the-shelf systems and predict the occurrence of intra-system´s feature interactions. We use pre-deployment simulations to forecast feature interactions before deployment. We assess the applicability and correctness of this approach through a set of simulated home assisted living scenarios.