A Framework for Evaluating the Safety of Health Monitoring Systems in the Home Environment

Abstract

Health monitoring systems in the home environment are safety-critical. It is necessary to evaluate the safety of health monitoring systems. Conventionally, system safety is guaranteed through conformance to related safety standards or requirements. This conformance is qualitatively demonstrated by the safety case. However, the result of the qualitative evaluation is not straightforward to review. Moreover, two problems must be considered from the viewpoint of systematic evaluation. First, if the result of the evaluation of a system is unsafe, the traceability of the result to the system safety requirements must be considered to improve system safety. Second, re-evaluation may occur in case of changes to system safety requirements or related system design. Thus, this paper proposes a framework for quantitative evaluating system safety for health monitoring systems. The framework focuses on three models, i.e., system safety requirements structure, safety case, and Bayesian network, with five steps to solve the above concerns. Finally, the framework is applied to an example health monitoring system for demonstration.

Keywords

• Bayesian network
• health monitoring systems
• safety case
• system safety evaluation framework
• system safety requirements
• traceability