Thanks to the 20+ participants, including these smiling fellows, and see you next year!

Overview

Health-related expenses often represent over 10% of a country’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 COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a massive worldwide impact, influencing our health and well-being, in particular the elderly population, Well-Being, Health, and Aging (WBAH) has become 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 stimulate well-being, encourage patients and the population in general to live according to healthy lifestyle recommendations, and address the specific needs of an aging population. These systems can provide personalized and tailored behavioral change programs 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 2023, namely “Redefining RE: Challenging RE Perceptions, Boundaries, and Topics”.

Partitioning the problem space in Health-oriented RE [presentation]

Biography

Professor (Emeritus) Alistair Sutcliffe (MA Cantab-Natural Sciences, PhD Wales) retired from the University of Manchester in October 2011. He continues his research with colleagues in Manchester, as a visiting professor in University College London and as a Research Fellow on the EPSRC Twenty-20 Insight Project in Aston University, Birmingham. He has been principle investigator on numerous EPSRC, ESRC, and European Union projects. His research interests span a wide area within Human Computer Interaction and Software and Systems Engineering. In HCI, particular interests include evaluating user experience, interaction design, and design of complex socio-technical systems. In software engineering, he specialises in requirements engineering, scenario-based design, and systems engineering processes. His experience includes industry-oriented applied research in aerospace and defence (safety engineering), healthcare informatics, food safety, and supply chain integration. He has over 300 publications including five books and several edited volumes of papers. From IFIP, he was awarded the silver core in 2000, the IFIP Pioneer award in 2016, and a Fellowship in 2021. From the IEEE Requirements Engineering community, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award  in 2011, as well as Best Paper Awards in 2005 and 2010.

Goals

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

• Developing approaches (incl. methods, taxonomies / ontologies, models, standard / reusable requirements) that support multiple perspectives of WBAH;

• 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 re-turn on investment of models, methods, tools, or techniques that improve patients’ engagement with systems related to well-being, aging, 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 among requirements engineering, patients, caregivers and clinicians; 

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

• Mitigating the influence of COVID-19 pandemic on our well-being and how technology can improve health-related challenges.

Topics of Interest

• Identifying, prioritizing, and integrating relevant health-related challenges;

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

• Health-related requirements acquisition, specification, analysis, and validation;

• Formal and informal modeling of health-related policies and requirements;

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

• Coordinating requirements change and the evolution of health-related guidelines, policies, and regulations;

• Considering age and aging in requirements engineering activities;

• Integrating guidelines and requirements engineering processes;

• Introducing existing products and services into new requirements;

• Requirements for artificial intelligence components in well-being, aging, and health systems and services;

• Requirements verification: monitoring, documenting, and auditing; 

• Evaluating the social, mental, health and economic benefits obtained through the use of requirements models, tools, or techniques; 

• Users’ perceptions and sustainable usage of health-related system;

• Risk, compliance assurance, and system certification;

• Meaningful, actionable, and trustworthy health-related data management;

• Health-related processes innovation and transformation;

• Fairness and social inclusion, cohesion, and solidarity;

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

• RE for ecological determinants of health.

Organization Committee