further we have summarized the most relevant ictstandards and medicalmanagerial guidelines involved enabling interoperability in contemporary homecare and assistedliving finally we have created various homecare related patentmaps by employing the european patent office epo searchengine espcenet and other sources by combining these three steps we have attempted to use the early disclosing potential of published ipdocuments to reduce eventually intentional obscuring of ipportfolios as it will be presented in details in the following sections if some patented technology is essential for the implementation of a standard then the corresponding patent granted is called standard essential patent sep