Ambrosio Toval

Empirical Studies on Usability of mHealth Apps: A Systematic Literature Review

The release of smartphones and tablets, which offer more advanced communication and computing capabilities, has led to the strong emergence of mHealth on the market. mHealth systems are being used to improve patients’ lives and their health, in addition to facilitating communication between doctors and patients. Researchers are now proposing mHealth applications for many health conditions such as dementia, autism, dysarthria, Parkinson’s disease, and so on. Usability becomes a key factor in the adoption of these applications, which are often used by people who have problems when using mobile devices and who have a limited experience of technology. The aim of this paper is to investigate the empirical usability evaluation processes described in a total of 22 selected studies related to mHealth applications by means of a Systematic Literature Review. Our results show that the empirical evaluation methods employed as regards usability could be improved by the adoption of automated mechanisms. The evaluation processes should also be revised to combine more than one method. This paper will help researchers and developers to create more usable applications. Our study demonstrates the importance of adapting health applications to users’ need.

A systematic review of UML model consistency management

Information System (IS) development has been beset by consistency problems since its infancy. These problems are greater still in UML software development, and are principally caused by the existence of multiple views (models) for the same system, and may involve potentially contradictory system specifications. Since a considerable amount of work takes place within the scope of model consistency management, this paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) which was carried out to discover the various current model consistency conceptions, proposals, problems and solutions provided. To do this, a total of 907 papers related to UML model consistency published in literature and extracted from the most relevant scientific sources (IEEE Computer Society, ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, and the SCOPUS Database) were considered, of which 42 papers were eventually analyzed. This systematic literature review resulted in the identification of the current state-of-the-art with regard to UML model consistency management research along with open issues, trends and future research within this scope. A formal approach for the handling of inconsistency problems which fulfils the identified limitations is also briefly presented.

Requirements Reuse for Improving Information Systems Security: A Practitioner’s Approach

Information systems security issues have usually been considered only after the system has been developed completely, and rarely during its design, coding, testing or deployment. However, the advisability of considering security from the very beginning of the system development has recently begun to be appreciated, and in particular in the system requirements specification phase. We present a practical method to elicit and specify the system and software requirements, including a repository containing reusable requirements, a spiral process model, and a set of requirements documents templates. In this paper, this method is focused on the security of information systems and, thus, the reusable requirements repository contains all the requirements taken from MAGERIT, the Spanish public administration risk analysis and management method, which conforms to ISO 15408, Common Criteria Framework. Any information system including these security requirements must therefore pass a risk analysis and management study performed with MAGERIT. The requirements specification templates are hierarchically structured and are based on IEEE standards. Finally, we show a case study in a system of our regional administration aimed at managing state subsidies.

On the generation of requirements specifications from software engineering models: A systematic literature review

System and software requirements documents play a crucial role in software engineering in that they must both communicate requirements to clients in an understandable manner and define requirements in precise detail for system developers. The benefits of both lists of textual requirements (usually written in natural language) and software engineering models (usually specified in graphical form) can be brought together by combining the two approaches in the specification of system and software requirements documents. If, moreover, textual requirements are generated from models in an automatic or closely monitored form, the effort of specifying those requirements is reduced and the completeness of the specification and the management of the requirements traceability are improved. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature related to the generation of textual requirements specifications from software engineering models.

A Systematic Review and Comparison of Security Ontologies

The use of ontologies for representing knowledge provides us with organization, communication and reusability. Information security is a serious requirement which must be carefully considered. Concepts and relations managed by any scientific community need to be formally defined and ontological engineering supports their definition. In this paper, the method of systematic review is applied with the purpose of identifying, extracting and analyzing the main proposals for security ontologies. The main identified proposals are compared using a formal framework and we conclude by stating their early state of development and the need of additional research efforts.

Legal requirements reuse: a critical success factor for requirements quality and personal data protection

Information technology misuse has increased the vulnerability of personal data, which has lead to growing concern about issues of personal privacy among political leaders, IT managers, information security consultants and the millions of people currently online. Many countries have developed, or are preparing, laws and regulations to combat the related threats and to guarantee personal data protection. Despite efforts to construct secure systems, few papers have, as yet, focused on security from the very outset of the system development life-cycle. This paper presents a pragmatic proposal to incorporate the legal and regulatory measures to guarantee personal data protection as a part of the requirements engineering process, instead of an addendum to system deployment. The authors investigate how recent efforts in the requirements engineering field can contribute to improving security issues in information systems, in particular those dealing with personal data. A reusable collection of security requirements and, as a novelty, personal data protection requirements (including information on related software components links) are provided. The pre-defined requirements, together with a simple process model based on requirements reuse, provide a strategy that organizations can use to become privacy-compliant.

Integrating usability requirements that can be evaluated in design time into Model Driven Engineering of Web Information Systems

In recent years, Web Engineering development projects have grown increasingly complex for and critical to the smooth running of organizations. However, recent studies reveal that a high percentage of these projects fail to attain the quality parameters required by stakeholders. The inadequate consideration of requirements management activities together with the absence of attention to the elicitation and evaluation of requirements and metrics related to certain quality attributes which are of special importance in this kind of systems, such as usability, have proved to be some of the main causes of this failure. This paper attempts to reduce some of the quality failures detected in Web Engineering development projects by proposing the consideration and evaluation of quality attributes from early stages of the development process. The presented approach therefore commences with a reinforcement of the requirements related activities in this discipline, which is carried out by using a requirements metamodel. Once these requirements have been identified, the approach focuses on the extension of the conceptual models used by Web Engineering methodologies with the aim of allowing the explicit consideration of usability requirements along with the evaluation of quality metrics during the design of the system. An example of an application illustrating how the approach can be used, along with the automatic support which was developed for it, are also shown.

Personal Health Records: New Means to Safely Handle Health Data?

Personal health records offer a way to manage health data while lessening healthcare costs, improving patient data quality, and fostering healthcare efficiency, but privacy and security issues are particularly important considerations for PHR designers.

Basis for an integrated security ontology according to a systematic review of existing proposals

The use of ontologies to represent knowledge provides us with organization, communication and reusability. The concepts and relations managed by any scientific community need to be formally defined. Since security in information technologies has evolved as a critical aspect and many related topics have been developed, this paper applies the method of systematic review for identifying, extracting and analyzing the principal proposals for security ontologies. The most mature proposals have been selected and compared by using a formal framework, extracting the key requirements that an integrated and unified security ontology should have, and providing the first steps towards its definition.

REMM-Studio: an Integrated Model-Driven Environment for Requirements Specification, Validation and Formatting.

In order to integrate requirements into the current Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, the traditional document-based requirements specification process should be changed into a requirements modelling process. To achieve this we propose a requirements metamodel called REMM (Requirements Engineering MetaModel) which includes the elements that should appear in a requirements model (requirements, stakeholders, test cases, etc.) together with the relationships that may appear between them. This metamodel is the basis of the REMM-Studio environment which enables: (1) to build graphical requirements models, (2) to validate them against the metamodel and against a set of additional OCL constraints, and (3) to automatically generate a navigable Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document as the main deliverable of the Requirements Engineering process. REMM-Studio is expected to ease the integration of requirements with other development models (e.g. component models) and to facilitate the validation of the SRS thanks to its navigability.