Elizabeth Manias

Yuqing Xiao, John Grundy, Anuradha Madugalla et al.

Requirements engineering for aged-care digital health must account for human aspects, because requirement priorities are shaped not only by technical functionality but also by stakeholders' health conditions, socioeconomics, and lived experience. Knowing which human aspects matter most, and for whom, is critical for inclusive and evidence-based requirements prioritisation. Yet in practice, while some studies have examined human aspects in RE, they have largely relied on expert judgement or model-driven analysis rather than large-scale user studies with meaningful human-in-the-loop validation to determine which aspects matter most and why. To address this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods study with 103 older adults, 105 developers, and 41 caregivers. We first applied an explainable machine learning to identify the human aspects most strongly associated with requirement priorities across 8 aged-care digital health themes, and then conducted 12 semi-structured interviews to validate and interpret the quantitative patterns. The results identify the key human aspects shaping requirement priorities, reveal their directional effects, and expose substantial misalignment across stakeholder groups. Together, these findings show that human-centric requirements analysis should engage stakeholder groups explicitly rather than collapsing their perspectives into a single aggregate view. This paper contributes an identification of the key human aspects driving requirement priorities in aged-care digital health and an explainable, human-centric RE framework that combines ML-derived importance rankings with qualitative validation to surface the stakeholder misalignments that inclusive requirements engineering must address.

Yuqing Xiao, John Grundy, Anuradha Madugalla et al.

We sought to explore and compare the perspectives of three key stakeholder groups: older adults, caregivers (formal health providers and informal caregivers), and digital health software developers on key functional and non-functional requirements. We conducted a survey, designed based on the findings from an existing systematic review, to gather and analyse data related to the three stakeholder groups' (dis)satisfaction with current aged care digital health software and their views on key future aged care software requirements. A mixed-methods survey approach integrated quantitative questionnaire data and qualitative open-ended responses from a total sample of 249, comprised of older adults (103), formal and informal caregivers (41), and software developers (105). Data analysis utilised a mixed methods approach, employing inferential statistics to compare group satisfaction levels and thematic analysis for qualitative open-ended responses. Our analysis reveals a significant "Requirements Gap". Software developers tend to prioritise advanced features and functional requirements, significantly overestimating user satisfaction with core NFRs such as ease of use and responsiveness. Conversely, developers were more critical of existing functional features compared to older adults and caregivers, who prioritised simplicity and reliability over feature density. By combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, we identified where stakeholder priorities align and where they diverge across functional and non-functional requirements in both the current designs they used and the future designs they desire. Our findings present a stakeholder gap analysis that can guide future co-design processes, near-term product decisions, and privacy-by-design recommendations in aged care digital health.