Christian Detweiler

A survey of values, technologies and contexts in pervasive healthcare

We argue that pervasive computing technologies for elderly care can have beneficial and harmful ethical implications. At the heart of these ethical implications lie the effects technologies have on human values, such as well-being, autonomy and privacy. A technologys functions influence how if affects values. These functions are the result of design decisions. So, design can play a part in dealing with ethical implications. We argue that by understanding the relationship between values and technologies in this domain, designers will be in a better position to account for values explicitly, and hence address ethical implications, throughout design. To foster such an understanding, we survey literature on pervasive computing for elderly care, and identify values, technologies and contexts discussed there. We develop a taxonomy to categorize our findings, which serves as a basis to identify and analyze relationships between values, technologies and contexts in pervasive computing for elderly care. With this analysis, we aim to help designers consider the ethical implications of their designs.

Embedding Stakeholder Values in the Requirements Engineering Process

Software has become an integral part of our daily lives and should therefore account for human values such as trust, autonomy and privacy. Human values have received increased attention in the field of Requirements Engineering over the last few years, but existing work offers no systematic way to use elicited values in requirements engineering and evaluation processes. In earlier work we proposed the Value Story workshop, a domain-independent method that connects value elicitation techniques from the field of Human-Computer Interaction to the identification of user stories, a common requirements specification format in Requirements Engineering. This paper studies whether user stories obtained in a Value Story workshop 1) adequately account for values, and 2) are usable by developers. The results of an empirical evaluation show that values are significantly better incorporated in user stories obtained in a Value Story workshop than through user stories obtained in regular requirements elicitation workshops. The results also show that value-based user stories are deemed valuable to the end-user, but rated less well on their size, estimableness and testability. This paper concludes that the Value Story workshop is a promising method for embedding values in the Requirements Engineering process, but that value-based user stories need to be translated to use cases to make them suitable for planning and organizing implementation activities.

Methods to account for values in human-centered computing

This workshop brings together scholars and practitioners of human-centered computing, requirements engineering, ethics and related fields. We will share knowledge and insights on methods to account for human values in information technology design. Through short presentations, group discussions and practical design group work, participants will collaborate on developing methodological frameworks for values in human-centered computing, and putting these methods into practice.

Value-sensitive design patterns for pervasive health care

Pervasive computing technologies offer solutions to many of the problems people face in aging. In doing so, they have the potential to support certain values such as human welfare. However, these solutions also have the potential to diminish human values such as trust, privacy and autonomy. Many of such value issues are recurrent, general problems that play out in specific application contexts. By accounting for values during the design of technology, designers would be in a better position to create technology that supports rather than hinders the values of its stakeholders. Yet, there are few methodical approaches to dealing with values in design. Moreover, knowledge on how specific value problems can be tackled is not captured systematically in a reusable way. We propose using Value Sensitive Design to analyze recurrent problems and identify affected stakeholders and their values. We use these analyses as a starting point for generating design patterns, or reusable solutions to recurrent problems, that explicitly include value considerations. We provide an initial set of value-sensitive design patterns as a proof-of-concept.

Values in design - building bridges between RE, HCI and ethics

Designing for values has become increasingly important for technology development. In many technological systems (medical applications, social networks etc.) values (privacy, autonomy, trust etc.) play a role and are sometimes violated. In working with stakeholder requirements or user needs, various design methods in requirements engineering (RE) [3] and human computer interaction (HCI), in specific user-centered (UCD), deal with “soft issues” [4], “social issues”, “people issues” or values. At the same time, applied ethics has begun to pay attention to design. We believe that many of the approaches could complement each other in useful ways. The aim of this workshop is to bring together people from different disciplines to share knowledge and insights about how to account for values in technology design, and to work towards integrating approaches, thereby putting value conscious design approaches (e.g. values-in-design [1] or value sensitive design [2]) to practice.

Towards Community-Based Co-creation

Current AAL solutions are often rejected by senior end-users, who do not perceive their benefits or themselves as the target group. This is due to the prevailing technology-driven design process that does not account for human needs. To shift the focus from the technology to the human, involvement of stakeholders in the design process is crucial. In this paper we outline some issues with involvement and continuous engagement of seniors and propose the concept of community-based co-creation as a way forward. Key is the facilitation of long-term collaboration of a community comprised of stakeholders including among others seniors, caregivers and researchers. Their neighborhoods serve as a natural context for designing and implementing their own solutions. We raise several points for consideration and first steps to be discussed.

An Introduction to the Pocket Negotiator: A General Purpose Negotiation Support System

The Pocket Negotiator (PN) is a negotiation support system developed at TU Delft as a tool for supporting people in bilateral negotiations over multi-issue negotiation problems in arbitrary domains. Users are supported in setting their preferences, estimating those of their opponent, during the bidding phase and sealing the deal. We describe the overall architecture, the essentials of the underlying techniques, the form that support takes during the negotiation phases, and we share evidence of the effectiveness of the Pocket Negotiator.