The Challenges behind Independent Living Support Systems

Despite their crucial goal of assisting the elderly through their daily routine, Independent Living Support systems still are at their inception. This paper postulates that such systems be designed with a number of requirements in mind, and in particular with safety, security and privacy as fundamental ones. It then correspondingly articulates the three main challenges behind the development of Independent Living Support systems: requirement elicitation, design and correctness analysis. It is found that requirement elicitation will have to cope with a large variety of issues; that design will have to proceed from modularity; and, notably, that correctness analysis will have to be socio-technical. The last finding in particular emphasises that, for a system that prescribes vast interaction with the human, system correctness only makes sense if the system is analysed in combination with the human, rather than in isolation from the human. Building upon previous experience with the socio-technical analysis of Internet browsers, this paper identifies the specific socio-technical challenges that Independent Living Support systems pose, and indicates an approach to succeed in taking them.