Requirements engineering for home care technology

The focus of this work is the requirements engineering process in the home care domain. The overall aim is to design and document a flexible methodology to facilitate the elicitation of complex, dynamic, multi-stakeholder requirements and needs. This paper details the complexity and uniqueness of the home care domain and outlines the features of home care that demand a new or tailored approach to requirements engineering. It concludes by presenting a consolidated list of features that must be available or supported in requirements engineering methods in the home care domain

Reminders that make sense: designing multisensory notifications for the home

<p>Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a synthesized overview of empirical work carried out in the MultiMemoHome Project in the area of designing multimodal reminders for home care. The paper aims to present an overview of multimodal interaction techniques and how they can be used to deliver messages to the user in a way that is more appropriate to the user's needs, the devices available, and the physical and social environment that the person is in when they receive a message.</p> <p>Design/methodology/approach – The paper argues that electronic reminders or notifications delivered in the home (such as appointments or when to take medication to your phone, computer or TV) should be available in multiple sensory modalities (visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory) in order to increase their usability and acceptability and make them accessible to a wider range of users. This paper supports these arguments by presenting an overview of a series of empirical studies that have been carried out (and reported elsewhere) on the design and evaluation of multimodal reminders for the home.</p> <p>Findings – The paper provides some guidelines and lessons learned on how to design personalisable multimodal reminder systems for the home.</p> <p>Originality/value – This paper presents a synthesized overview of a body of existing research on multimodal reminder design for the home. Its contribution is in the argument and presentation of empirical findings that support these arguments. A set of guidelines emerging from the body of work is also presented.</p&gt

Including stakeholders in the design of home care systems: Identification and categorisation of complex user requirements

Home Care Systems have not been taken up in people’s homes as eagerly as might have first been anticipated. Yet with an increasing ageing population and an increased drive to support people living independently in their own homes, there is a continuing need for well designed, acceptable Home Care Systems. The complexity of the requirements of both individuals and the network of care surrounding people in their homes makes providing home care solutions a difficult task. In particular, what is known about, and expected of Home Care Systems is still unclear and can often differ between the various stakeholders involved. This paper is part of a project on Mobilising Advanced Technologies for Care at Home and presents the motivations for including stakeholders in both the design and ongoing configuration of homecare systems

Addressing stakeholder conflict in home care systems

Ubiquitous and mobile computing technologies can provide novel and powerful support for home-based management or improvement of the well being of the ageing population living with care conditions in their own homes. However, such home care systems are not easy to design. In particular, such system are subject to potential problems arising from competing demands of different interacting stakeholders, resulting in potential failure or at least serious degradation of system effectiveness or user satisfaction. We present a conceptual framework for the representation of such stakeholder conflict in home care systems, identifying types of stakeholder, types and sources of potential conflict, and some initial ideas about how design methods and appropriately constructed system infrastructure might help with the identification, negotiation and resolution of such conflict

An integrated approach to supporting interaction evolution in home care systems

There are many sources of change within the domain of home care. People have changing needs, beliefs, and preferences regarding their care plan and how they might want to interact with existing and emerging home care technologies. The devices and services available to the user are likely to change over time depending on a person's capabilities or location within the home and the current devices and services available. The resulting interaction methods can therefore also change in accordance with the room location, available devices or displays, or preferred modalities. Home care systems therefore need to offer configuration possibilities that support this change. Computer systems offer methods and tools to support configuration in the short term, but do not provide mechanisms for supporting configuration over both short and long term. This paper presents an approach that addresses this issue in the home care domain by integrating methods for interaction requirements engineering with system support for turning those requirements into a working configuration. Both the methods and system support are designed to address a gradual process of change -- 'interaction evolution' in home care. We present the key features of our approach using a home care scenario and consider our progress to date in implementing and validating the approach

Audio reminders in the home environment

In this paper we report an experimental comparison between three different types of audio reminders in the home setting: speech, earcons, and a simple pager sound. We examine how quickly and accurately participants were able to interpret the reminders, and to what extent presentation of the reminders interfered with a digit span background task. In addition, a questionnaire was used to gather user preferences and attitudes towards the different types of reminders. Although participants perform best with speech reminders, there are large inter-subject differences in performance, and over 50% prefer non-speech audio reminders. The implications for the design and application of auditory interfaces for home-based reminder systems are discussed

User evaluation of OIDE: a rapid prototyping platform for multimodal interaction

The Open Interface Development Environment (OIDE) was developed as part of the OpenInterface (OI) platform, an open source framework for the rapid development of multimodal interactive systems. It allows the graphical manipulation of components stored in a structured and rich repository of modalities and interaction techniques. The platform is expected to act as a central tool for an iterative user centred design process for multimodal interactive system design. This paper presents a user study (N=16) designed to explore how the platform was used in practice by multimodal interaction designers and developers. Participants were introduced to the features and functionality of the tool via tutorials and then engaged in an open multimodal design exercise. Participants were expected to explore various multimodal solutions to the design scenario using both traditional prototyping tools and the features available to them via the OIDE prototyping tool. The workshops were recorded and the interaction and dialogue examined to gather feedback on how the OI tool was used or could be used to support or enhance the design stages of prototyping a multimodal application or interface. The results indicate that the OI platform could be a useful tool to support the early design stages during multimodal interaction design. The tool appeared to promote thinking about and using different modalities. The teams varied in size and composition and this appears to have an effect on how the teams approached the task and exploited the OI prototyping tool. We will offer some guidelines as to how open, rapid prototyping tools such as OIDE can be improved to better support multimodal interaction design