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

Well-Being, Aging, and Health (WBAH) are important aspects of life that affect us all. The 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, according to the World Health Organizatio

Toward a Comprehensive Understanding and Evaluation of the Sustainability of E-Health Solutions

Digital health transformation (DHT) has been deployed rapidly worldwide, and many e-health solutions are being invented and improved on an accelerating basis. Healthcare already faces many challenges in terms of reducing costs and allocating resources optimally, while improving provided services. E-solutions in healthcare can be a key enabler for improvements while controlling the budget; however, if the sustainability of those solutions is not assessed, many resources directed towards e-solutions and the cost of adoption/implementation will be wasted. Thus, it is important to assess the sustainability of newly proposed or already in-use e-health solutions. In the literature, there is a paucity of empirically driven comprehensive sustainability models and assessment tools to guide practices in real-world cases. Hence, this study proposes a comprehensive sustainability model for e-health solutions to assess the essential sustainability aspects of e-health solutions and anticipate the likelihood of their sustainability. To build the model, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to extract the e-health sustainability dimensions and elements. In addition, the SLR analyzes the existing definitions of sustainability in healthcare and sustainability assessment methods. The proposed sustainability model has five dimensions, namely; technology, organization, economic, social, and resources. Each dimension has aspects that provide another level of required detail to assess sustainability. In addition, an assessment method was developed for this model to assess the aspects of each dimension, resulting in the overall prediction of the e-health solution’s sustainability level. The sustainability model and the assessment method were validated by three experts in terms of comprehensiveness and applicability to be used in healthcare. Furthermore, a case study was conducted on a Hospital Information System (HIS) of a hospital in Saudi Arabia to evaluate the sustainability model and its assessment method. The sustainability model and assessment method were illustrated to be effective in evaluating the sustainability of e-solutions and more comprehensive and systematic than the evaluation used in the hospital

UsAge guidelines: Toward usable Saudi M-Government applications for elderly users

With the rapid adoption of digital transformation, the Saudi government launched several applications to provide many online services for citizens, especially under the circumstances imposed by COVID-19. As those applications were designed to service a wide spectrum of users, it is expected that some groups of users may face challenges regarding the usability of the applications. In particular, elderly users are expected to have difficulties while interacting with m-government applications due to the limitations imposed by the aging process, culture, and familiarity with technology. In the literature, there are some usability guidelines that describe how to design usable mobile applications for the elderly. Still, they rarely address differences in culture, cognitive and psychological abilities of the elderly, and the criticality of context in which a mobile application is used. Hence, in this paper, we propose a set of usability guidelines that are expected to enhance the usability of m-government applications for the elderly. The guidelines, called UsAge, cover three major aspects, which are elderly characteristics, culture, and context, that affect the usability of mobile applications. The guidelines were driven by conducting three usability evaluation methods on an m-government application: usability testing with users, cognitive walkthrough, and heuristics evaluation. In addition, interviews with Saudi elderly individuals were conducted to extract their characteristics and define their limitations in using such applications. These characteristics are utilized to customize existing m-government application guidelines. The guidelines emerging from the two phases were combined and validated by experts, who found them feasible, correct, comprehensive, and understandable. In addition, they found that they are unique and do not overlap with existing guidelines. The outcome of this paper is the UsAge guidelines, which are a set of 28 new guidelines that are incorporated into existing m-government application usability guidelines