Sixth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Well-Being, Aging, and Health
September 2, Valencia, Spain

Many thanks to our presenters and participants for making this year’s workshop so inspiring!

Let's keep the momentum going at REWBAH 2026!

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 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 2025, namely “Future-proofing Requirements Engineering”.

Keynote talk

Laura Fiorini

Designing and Deploying Assistive Technologies: From Requirements Definition to Real-World Use

Abstract

Designing effective and usable technologies is a long process that starts from the definition of user requirements (Functional and emotional requirements) and arrives – after a long journey – to the tests in real-world. Which are the technological and non-technological barriers that may limit the use of the technologies? What is the role that the process of engineering requirements definition may play in the technology usage? This talk will present and discuss a four steps methodology applied in the Pharaon Project to design and to test assistive solutions for promoting the aging-well and the well-being of older adults.

Biography

Laura Fiorini is a tenured assistant professor at the University of Florence, Department of Industrial Engineering, Florence, Italy. She received the M.Sc. Degree in Biomedical Engineering at University of Pisa in 2012 (full marks, cum laude). She obtained a Ph.D. in Biorobotics (full marks, cum laude) at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, in 2016. In 2015 she visited the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at University of West England (Bristol, UK). From 2016 to 2020, she was post-doc researcher at the BioRobotics Institute and from 2020 to 2022 she was a post-doc at the University of Florence. She collaborated at different EU and national projects such as: Fit4Medical Robotics, Pharaon, Robot-Era, ACCRA, CloudIA and SI-ROBOTICS. Currently she is the coordinator of the Pharaon Italian Pilot (Pharaon Project) and scientific responsible for DESTINI project. Her research interest is mainly focused on social robotics for assisting and supporting frail people with a special focus on the design and the evaluation of the prototype in real environments.

Program

All times are local Valencia times.

Session 1: Welcome to REWBAH 2025 and Keynote

9:30 - 9:45: Welcome from the organizers
9:45 - 10:30: Keynote. Laura Fiorini. Designing and Deploying Assistive Technologies: From Requirements Definition to Real-World Use.

Break

Session 2: Research Papers

11:00 – 11:30: Luis A Garnica Chavira, Oscar A Mondragon, Natalia Villanueva-Rosales, Yair Cabrera Menendez and Jeffrey Escamilla. Integrating Older Adults’ Needs and Challenges in Requirements Validation: Lessons Learned from a Facilitated Usability Study. (Full paper)
11:30 – 12:00: Maryam Rabie Yeganeh and Samuel A. Fricker. “One Size Doesn’t Fit All”: Patient Support in a Decentralised Clinical Trial. (Full paper)
12:00 – 12 :30: Nancy Manasreh, Paola Spoletini, Maria Valero de Clemente, Luisa Valentina Nino de Valladares and Israel Sanchez-Cardona. Designing Age-Friendly Apps: Mining Functional, Usability, and Privacy Requirements from Existing Mobile Applications. (Vision paper)

Lunch

Session 3: Research Papers

14:00 – 14:30: Samuel A. Fricker, Lauri Goldkind, Joshua Weber and Stefan Hackstein. Cases and Lessons in Prompting Artificial Intelligence for Social Work. (Full paper)
14:30 – 15:00: Shweta Premanandan, Sofia Ouhbi, Magdalena Stadin, Charlotte Blease, Åsa Cajander and Maria Hägglund. Iterative Development of a Semi-Structured Interview Guide to Explore Clinicians’ Experiences with Connected Mental Health. (Vision paper)
15:00 – 15:30: Ethan Hadar, Irit Hadar, Meira Levy and Sharon Zlotnik. A Requirements Approach for Ecological Health Agentic AI: The Case of Digital Mentor for Occupational Therapists. (Vision paper)

Break

Session 4: Panel Discussion, Outcome Identification and Conclusion

16:00 – 17:00: Panel Discussion
17:00 – 17:30: Outcome Identification and Conclusion

Goals

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

Develop RE approaches (incl. methods, taxonomies/ontologies, models, standard/reusable requirements, ad-hoc solutions, AI aspects) that support multiple perspectives of positively contributing to WBAH under strict compliance and ethics scrutiny.
Develop methods for defining and monitoring requirements of systems and services that promote well-being or health.
Explore the requirements engineering implications of emerging technologies used for innovating in the health sector.
Identify open research and industry challenges, as well as validation objectives for proposed solutions.

Submissions

REWBAH (pronounced roo-bah) is looking for papers in two general categories (in IEEE CS format):

Long - Research/Experience/Review papers (10 pages max., including references)
Short - Vision papers (4-6 pages, including references)

Important: papers submitted to the workshop must follow strictly the formatting instructions imposed by the publisher (LaTeX and Word templates are provided).

Submissions shall be done via EasyChair (rewbah2025). Each submission will be reviewed by three members of the REWBAH 2025 Program Committee. Preference will be given to submissions that emphasize informed, topic-relevant, and technically sound descriptions of important challenges and problems as opposed to just proposed solutions.

Accepted papers will be published in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library as workshop proceedings. All authors of all accepted contributions will be asked to complete an electronic IEEE Copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera-ready versions from Conference Publishing Services (CPS). Acceptance of a paper implies that one of the authors registers for the workshop to present the submission; failure to do so by the early registration date will result in the paper being withdrawn from the workshop proceedings. IEEE reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the workshop (e.g., by not placing it into the IEEE Xplore Digital Library) if the paper is not presented at the workshop.

Important Dates

Abstract Submission: June 2, 2025 (optional, but let us know that you intend to submit!)
Paper Submission : Extended to June 12, 2025 (AoE)
Paper Notification: July 7, 2025
Camera Ready Due: July 17, 2025
Workshop: Sep 2, in person, as part of the RE'25 conference