Requirements Engineering for Well-Being, Aging, and Health: An Overview for Practitioners

Abstract

Well-being, aging, and health (WBAH) are important aspects of life that affect us all. Requirements for WBAH systems have also become a topic of common interest for researchers from different disciplines. This is unsurprising given that health-related expenses often represent about 10% of a country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to the World Health Organization [1]. At the same time, there is a growing number of software practitioners working on various technology-enabled solutions for WBAH systems. For example, software systems provide personalized and tailored behavioral change programs for decreasing health risk factors. Yet, many systems and services that promote health or well-being fail, in part due to requirements engineering (RE) issues.

Sustaining human health: A requirements engineering perspective

“…Realizing that healthcare systems are often large-scale, complex, and involve many kinds of uncertain knowledge that pose considerable problems for RE (Sutcliffe et al 2020), the REWBAH workshop series was initiated in 2020 to address the complex nature of developing healthcare software systems (Levy, Liu, et al 2021). In the first workshop, the participants collaboratively identified the challenges REWBAH research should address (Levy, Liu, et al 2021), including:…”

Towards Ontology-Based Requirements Engineering for IoT-Supported Well-Being, Aging and Health

“…Requirements engineering for WBAH (REWBAH) can e.g. "identify specific challenges of uncertainty, anxiety, and loneliness from different age perspectives, and help assess how emerging home-office/mixed-office environments influence the well-being and health of people" [2].…”

“…Confronting such a global, not only public health but also economic and social crisis, with both short and potentially long term consequences, showed all the seriousness of dealing with well-being, aging, and health (WBAH) as important aspects of life that affect everybody [2]. To inspect definitions of each of the WBAH aspects, health is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity" [3].…”

REWBAH 2021: Second International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Well-Being, Aging, and Health : Welcome from the Organizers

“…Following the work initiated last year, which led to a journal publication [1] involving many of the participants, part of the workshop was dedicated to a research agenda for the future.…”