Improvements of the xAAL Home Automation System
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
the authors proposed a very interesting concept design enabling the xAAL home-automation system. The paper reads smoothly, and here are some minor suggestions:
-- for those who are not familiar with xAAL, the authors need briefly define/describe them
-- the abstract should be more specific, based on the current description, it is not very clear what are the newly proposed concepts
-- keywords: mentioned 'ambient assisted living' 'comfort &wellbeing', but it is not described in the main context
-- main context: occupancy sensing is a significant factor for home-automation system, i.e. lighting, programmable/smart thermostat, HVAC, etc, however, it is not mentioned/considered in the system improvement.
Other than that, there are some minor gramma mistakes, please double check.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper presents the xAAL system that has been developed as a home-automation system with a focus on interoperability.
The paper focusses on a description of the xAAL system architecture and the protocols, schemas, etc that it contains. Each section discusses different aspects of the system with references to existing work on that aspect.
The paper seems more like a document written for 3rd-party developers rather than a research paper - the aim seems to be to provide the details necessary for a developer to integrate a device into the system. It is unclear what the benefit is for the research community of the work in the paper.
The xAAL system itself seems interesting and potentially useful but it is not clear to me why this would make a useful journal publication - what knowledge does this paper add to the field?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper is a detailed description of the improvement of the xAAL home automation system. Authors describe the architecture, the protocols, the device schemas, the security and the reasons of their decisions.
It could be interesting to know that are the xAAL versions: current and previous ones.
Generally the paper appears to contains too technical details. Authors provide numerous details on the standard, protocols and solutions they studied while they could write a shorter description of external elements and a wider comparison between them and the solution in xAAL. Interested readers will read the referenced resources to know details of protocols, etc. It should be applied in sections 5.7 and in 5.6.
A section with the comparison of xAAL with other similar home automation systems and AAL architectures help to understand the improvements respect to the state-of-art. It will let to add references too.
To better understand the xAAL features and potentials, authors could include a scenario or a tested scenario and describe the complexity of the system installation.
Conclusions could be improved including future works.
Some sub-paragraphs look to be not numbered, e.g. in section 5.6.
The English is fine. Some minor errors in r. 52 and 823.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have made some improvements to the paper that better introduce it and situate it within the domain. I still feel that there is a lot of technical detail of the software itself that would be more useful to developers than researchers. However the current version of the paper does seem more suitable for publication.
