Dealing with Change in Home Care

Home care applications, that enable improved independent living for the elderly, the disabled and those suffering from chronic medical conditions, present difficult design and engineering challenges because their requirements are subject to continuous, complex changes that are difficult to anticipate.

In the MATCH project, a multi-university Scottish research project addressing home care technology and its development, we are addressing these challenges in two ways: (1) We are trying to understand the nature of these changing requirements (where do they come from, who is involved in creating the change, who and what is impacted by the change) as well as developing better ways of identifying and responding to the changes. (2) Developing a home care software infrastructure to help deal flexibly and effectively with these changing requirements. This talk will give an introduction to our recent work in these two areas. In the first part of the talk I will present our method of requirements capture with home care stakeholders, including the use of theatre as an elicitation aid, and our initial findings identifying key issues that influence changing requirements. In the second part of the talk I will present the MATCH home care infrastructure, focussing on the components that support the management of run-time policies that represent requirements, the configuration of the system to address these policies and the evolution of the system to handle new policies based on requirements change.

Philip Gray est maître de conférences en informatique à l’Université de Glasgow. Depuis plus de 20 ans, il s’intéresse aux systèmes interactifs configurables de manière dynamique. Il a notamment contribué au développement du langage de modélisation de tâches UAN. Récemment, il a focalisé ses recherches sur les systèmes interactifs mobiles, et plus particulièrement pour une utilisation dans des applications médicales.
Site web : www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~pdg