Requirements and Evaluation of Safety Analysis Techniques for Ambient Assisted Living Systems

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems are becoming more and more important because of the multitude of usage scenarios for such systems in our daily living. They are aware of their environment, are open for the integration of new devices and adapt to changing context. Moreover they are safety critical and must be analyzed thoroughly. These characteristics impose new requirements to safety analysis techniques which are not clearly understood and whose satisfaction is not demonstrated. Hence the improvement of safety analysis techniques for AAL systems is often not done systematically. Based on AAL systems characteristics we elicit a set of requirements, which we use to evaluate commonly used safety analysis techniques. We started the consolidation of our findings by conducting a controlled experiment for comparing the most promising approach (state/event fault tree analysis) with other approaches.