Overview

Health-related expenses often represent over 10% of a coun-try’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and this proportion is increasing according to the World Health Organization . Many systems and services that promote health fail to engage people in the long term, and yet requirements engineering research in this area is sparse. Nowadays, when the post COVID-19 pandemic, climate changes, and worldwide human conflicts have massive worldwide impact, influencing our health and well-being, in particular within the elderly population, WBAH is even more relevant than ever.

The REWBAH workshop fosters discussion related to requirements engineering resulting from the need to build software systems that not only support healthcare, but also foster well-being, encourage patients and the population in general to live according to healthy lifestyle recommendations, and ad-dress the specific needs of an aging population. These systems can provide personalized and tailored behavioral change pro-grams for decreasing health risk factors. 

This theme is also in line with the objectives of the American Healthy People 2030 Framework on health promotion and disease prevention, with a vision for “A society in which all people can achieve their full potential for health and well-being across the lifespan”. Well-being is part of a more holistic definition of health that, according to the World Health Organization, is “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’’. 

The workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers from Software and Requirements Engineering, Medicine, Health Sciences, Psychology, and other relevant disciplines. This workshop is open to the public. The workshop goals as well as the workshop multidisciplinary audience are well aligned with the theme of Requirements Engineering (RE) conference 2024, namely “Exploring New Horizons: Expanding the Frontiers of Requirements Engineering”.

Biography

Daniel Amyot is Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Ottawa, and a member of the LIFE Research Institute and of the Institut du Savoir Montfort. At uOttawa, he is Director of the online and multidisciplinary Master’s program in Digital Transformation and Innovation. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Ottawa in 2002. His research interests include requirements engineering, process mining, goal and process modeling, regulatory compliance, smart contracts, and healthcare informatics. Daniel led the standardization of the User Requirements Notation at the International Telecommunication Union from 2002 to 2013, as well as the development of the jUCMNav modelling tool. He is also invested in the development of the Symboleo specification language for smart legal contracts. He was general chair of the Requirements Engineering conference in 2015, program co-chair in 2018, and steering committee chair from 2019 to 2021. In 2020, Daniel also co-created with others the International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Well-Being, Aging, and Health (REWBAH). Daniel is on the editorial boards of SoSyM and the Requirements Engineering Journal. He is a Professional Engineer in Québec, an Information Systems Professional in Canada, and a Senior Member of IEEE.

Abstract

Housing is a strong social determinant of health and well-being. Yet, in Canada, where there is a growing demand for social housing, many households wait years before being offered an affordable place to live. The recent pandemic, high immigration, and the explosion of housing costs only made things worse. Making informed decisions about what type and quantity of social housing stock would be required to meet the dynamic needs of these households is limited by our ability to access and use various administrative databases from social housing organizations. In this context, this extended abstract gives an overview of ongoing work on the engineering of requirements for an innovative Decisions for Affordable/Social Housing (DASH) system prototype, which is itself aiming to facilitate the elicitation of realistic requirements from many stakeholders in the Canadian social housing ecosystem. Our early results are expected to influence how Requirements Engineering can be successfully applied to the increasingly important domain of social housing.

Goals

The goals of this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Developing approaches (incl. methods, taxonomies / ontologies, models, standard / reusable requirements / ad-hoc solutions) that support multiple perspectives of wellbeing, aging, and health; 

• Developing methods for defining and monitoring requirements of systems and services that promote well-being or health;

• Considering systematically evidence-based factors of health risk reductions in systems and services;

• Developing measures or metrics to evaluate the return on investment of models, methods, tools, or techniques that improve patients’ engagement with systems related to well-being or health;

• Determining whether and how well-being, age, and values can be used as measurable quality properties for requirements;

• Improving communication and aligning processes be-tween requirements engineering, patients, caregivers and clinicians, and software developers, in particular for aspects related to health and well-being; 

• Identifying open research and industry challenges, as well as validation objectives for proposed solutions; and

• Exploring how technology can improve health-related challenges and how to mitigate the influence of technology on our well-being.

Topics of Interest

• Identifying, prioritizing, and integrating relevant challenges that push the frontiers of requirements en-gineering for WBAH;

• Elicitation of generic psycho-social and demographic concepts and their potential effects on clinical goals and actions;

• Formal and informal modeling of WBAH related pol-icies and requirements;

• Traceability and alignment between clinical guide-lines, well-being definitions, aging/health challenges and requirements;

• Coordinating requirements change and the evolution of WBAH guidelines, policies, and regulations;

• Considering WBAH in requirements acquisition, specification, analysis, and validation;

• Integrating guidelines and requirements engineering processes for promoting WBAH;

• Introducing existing products and services into new WBAH requirements;

• Requirements for artificial intelligence components in WBAH systems and services;

• Users’ perceptions, trust, barriers and sustainable us-age of WBAH-related system;

• Meaningful, actionable, and trustworthy data man-agement for WBAH systems and services;

• WBAH processes innovation and transformation;

• Addressing fairness and social inclusion, cohesion, and solidarity in requirements for WBAH systems and services;

• Requirements for global information systems that can help people, decision makers, and researchers during pandemics; 

• RE for ecological determinants of health.

Organization Committee