Elsevier

Journal of Systems and Software

Volume 147, January 2019, Pages 215-229
Journal of Systems and Software

Emotion-oriented requirements engineering: A case study in developing a smart home system for the elderly

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2018.06.077Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A requirements engineering method to model emotional goals in software is introduced.

  • A case study presents the design of the SofiHub smart homes emotion and goal models.

  • An empirical evaluation has been carried out for elderly people using SofiHub.

  • Results show that the developed solution has met the emotional goals identified.

  • Findings from case study are used to refine the research method and evaluation tools.

Abstract

Smart home technology has received growing interest in recent years with a focus on automation and assistance, for example, Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomePod, and many cheap IoT devices. Better supporting elderly people to continue live in their home using smart home technology is a key target application. However, most of the existing smart home solutions for the elderly are not designed with people’s emotional goals in mind, leading to lack of adoption, lack of engagement, and failure of the technology. In this paper, we introduce an emotion-oriented requirements engineering approach to help identifying, modeling and evaluating emotional goals. We also explain how we used this technique to help us develop SofiHub - a new smart home platform for elderly people. SofiHub comprises a range of devices and software for sensing, interaction, passive monitoring, and emergency assistance. We have conducted multiple trials including initial field trials for elderly people in real houses. We have used our emotion-oriented requirements techniques to evaluate the participants’ emotional reactions before, during, and after trials to understand the impact of such technology on elderly people’s emotions to the SofiHub solution. Our analysis shows that SofiHub successfully alleviates their loneliness, makes them feel safer and cared about. We also found that the trial participants developed a strong relation with the system and hence, felt frustrated when SofiHub did not respond in ways expected or desired. We reflect on the lessons learned from the trials related to our emotion-oriented design and evaluation experimental approach, including refining our set of evaluation tools.

Introduction

Software professionals often design a product from a set of desired functional and non-functional goals based on their understanding of the system, resulting in an end-product which fails to fulfill the needs of its intended users. A growing concern can be found in literature where researchers (Demiris, Rantz, Aud, Marek, Tyrer, Skubic, Hussam, 2004, Pedell, Sterling, Keirnan, Dobson, 2013, Mendoza, Miller, Pedell, Sterling, 2013, Ramos, Berry, Carvalho, 2005) pointed out that software engineers fail to give adequate consideration to user’s emotional needs when designing systems, leading to unhappy end-users. Even though the consideration of emotion is becoming predominant in the area of design, including human-computer interaction, this consideration has not been successfully mapped to the software engineering field (Miller et al., 2015). Evidence (Demiris, Rantz, Aud, Marek, Tyrer, Skubic, Hussam, 2004, Pedell, Sterling, Keirnan, Dobson, 2013, Norman, 2005, Mendoza, Carroll, Stern, 2010), on the other hand, suggests that user emotions are a key determinant in the acceptance of a technology, particularly with regards to domestic and social systems.

Home-based age-care has emerged as a key alternative to address the growing burden of aged care and elderly people generally prefer to stay at home and enjoy their privacy and independence. However, this introduces a substantial burden on the government to fund and develop enough skilled staff (such as nurses) to look after the growing number of older adults. Smart home technology introduces a promising solution to this problem with the aim to help elderly people stay at home and live independently while maintaining a good quality of life for far less cost and human resources. Even though several smart home technologies already exist in the market, evidence suggests that many elderly people are not fully keen on using these systems (Demiris, Rantz, Aud, Marek, Tyrer, Skubic, Hussam, 2004, Pedell, Sterling, Keirnan, Dobson, 2013, Miller, Pedell, Lopez-Lorca, Mendoza, Sterling, Keirnan, 2015). One of the major reasons identified for this lack of interest points towards the failure to consider human, social and organizational factors along with technical factors when building such systems (Demiris, Rantz, Aud, Marek, Tyrer, Skubic, Hussam, 2004, Pedell, Sterling, Keirnan, Dobson, 2013, Miller, Pedell, Lopez-Lorca, Mendoza, Sterling, Keirnan, 2015, Baxter, Sommerville, 2011).

Building socio-technical or people-oriented systems such as smart home technologies has never been more challenging with the increasing need to understand the social requirements of users. As social beings, users have emotional needs, such as to be independent, to feel cared about and feel secure. Given that these needs cannot be easily converted into functional or non-functional requirements using the existing software engineering methodologies, they are often ignored or trivialised within the current software development processes (Paay et al., 2009). These social needs, which we refer to as “users’ emotional goals” (Kissoon Curumsing, 2017), are critical to the acceptance of a system and therefore cannot be ignored.

Existing efforts (Kissoon Curumsing, 2017, Kissoon-Curumsing, Pedell, Vasa, 2014, Kissoon-Curumsing, Lorca-Lopez, Miller, Sterling, Vasa, 2014) have highlighted the importance of considering users’ emotional expectations from the inception phase of the software project. They also presented a set of emotion-oriented techniques to capture, model and evaluate users’ emotional goals. We followed a similar emotion-oriented approach to develop a new smart home solution – called SofiHub – designed to support independent living among elderly people, thus addressing a key problem of aging population. This technology was designed as an ambient system using non-intrusive motion sensors to alleviate elder people’s concerns regarding their privacy, and also ‘feeling old’ when they have to put wearables on.

Research questions. In this paper, we focus on three key research questions:

  • RQ1: What are the key emotional goals necessary when building a smart home solution for elderly people?

  • RQ2: How to engineer a smart home solution to address these goals?

  • RQ3: How to verify that SofiHub meets elderly people’s emotional goals?

In order to address these research questions, we have used our emotion-oriented techniques developed earlier (Kissoon Curumsing, 2017) to identify and model users’ pain points, and came up with an emotion model and goal model. We then used the goal model to guide the design and implementation of SofiHub. The goal model was then used to guide the design of our trials to make sure that we captured participants’ emotions as part of the survey and interviews, that we conducted before, during and after the trials.

In this paper, we reflect on the implications of using an emotion-oriented design approach to develop SofiHub taking into consideration people’s emotions. We also discuss the emotion related findings from the trials testing the system, within the homes of 10 participants. In particular, we focus on evaluating the long term impact that smart homes, such as SofiHub, can have over people’s emotions and their willingness to adopt the technology over time. The timeline for our trial was conducted over only three months but our analysis shows that SofiHub improves and amplifies the affordances of a home (compared to a ‘dumb’ home) Fernando et al. (2016). In addition, it addresses users’ emotional expectations from such systems.

Contributions. This paper has the following contributions:

  • An industrial case study of using an emotion-oriented requirements engineering approach to the design of a smart home emotion model and goal model. The emotion model captures users’ pain points and translates them into a set of goals. The goal model represents the key emotional goals that need to be taken into consideration when building a smart home technology.

  • A smart home solution that has emotions as a first class citizen, with detailed descriptions of how SofiHub was designed with emotional goals in mind.

  • Reflections on real world trials of smart home technology. We present a detailed description of the trials we have conducted to evaluate how elderly people perceived SofiHub with emotions baked into the system.

The rest of this paper is organised as follows: In Section 2, we outline the key efforts in smart home technologies, and highlight the need to consider emotions when designing smart home systems. In Section 3, we present an overview of the set of emotion-oriented requirements engineering techniques that were used to design SofiHub. In Section 4, we describe the features of SofiHub, present the protocol used for the trial, identify the emotional goals and discuss the key relevant decision rationale. In Section 5, we describe our evaluation process, key findings and the implications of these findings on the next generation of SofiHub. In Section 6, we discuss the threats to validity and in Section 7, we reflect on our findings and emotion-oriented approach.

Section snippets

Smart home technologies

The world is facing an increasing demographic challenge due to observed population aging. People above 60 will make 22 percent of the world population by 2050. In Europe, citizens aged above 65 are expected to represent 30 percent of the population by 2050. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), by 2030, the population above 65 will increase by 84 percent to be 5.1 million representing 18 percent of the population. This poses many challenges related to how we can provide proper

Emotions and emotional goals

Table 2 provides a summary of some of the classifications of emotion over time (Kissoon Curumsing, 2017). This highlights the different classifications of emotion as presented within different disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, medicine and computer science.

An important finding is that the terms used to identify emotion such as anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise do not relate to user emotional expectations. Our focus is to incorporate user emotional

Case study of using emotion-oriented requirements engineering

This section introduces our case study example of a smart home technology, SofiHub, and describes our case study of using Emotion-oriented Requirements Engneering for SofiHub’s analysis, feature design and validation using human trials. It also describes how the emotion-oriented techniques were applied at different stages of the development process.

Emotion-oriented evaluation process

The SofiHub trials generated a large amount of data in terms of interview transcripts and questionnaires. In this section, we present the emotion-oriented method used to analyse these data and present the findings from this process. We also reflect on the implications of these findings for our next set of trials and design changes.

Threats to validity

Emotional goals: The emotional goals that we have developed represent a good starting point to emotional-goals for smart home technologies. However, these goals are based on the state-of-the-art in the literature as well as our findings from the initial workshops and trials on our solution. This explains why in our trials we learned about two missing goals in our original model – as reported above – which will be integrated with the initial model and used in phase 2 SofiHub development and

Discussion

In this work, we presented a set of emotion-oriented requirements engineering and evaluation techniques, which we applied to design and evaluate our new Smart Home Technology - SofiHub. Designing systems with an emotion-oriented approach entails a number of challenges. First of all, emotion-oriented techniques are not mature enough. For example, our technique has been trialled on four real-world scenarios until now. Second, given the subjective nature of emotions, it is hard to develop a

Conclusion

Capturing, modeling and realizing emotional goals is a key enabler to the adoption of socio-technical or people-oriented systems. This work contributes towards emphasising the importance of such emotional goals during system design and provides a set of emotion-oriented techniques to engineer a smart home technology.

In this paper, we have applied emotion-oriented techniques to develop SofiHub, a smart home technology for elderly people. We have presented a Smart home emotion and goal model that

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the SofiHub team who allowed us to use their technology to acquire the trial data for this work. We would also like to acknowledge the efforts put forward by the DSTIL team at Deakin University to develop the smart home technology.

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