Eliciting Smartphone App Requirements for Helping Senior People: A Questionnaire Approach

The world’s unprecedented growth of the senior demographic is bringing key age-related issues to the forefront. Issues such as memory loss, vision impairment, hearing loss, loss of mobility (or loss of dexterity in the hands), and speech loss prevent seniors from interacting with others. We believe that a lot can be done to improve seniors’ lives, but current smartphone apps are often not usable or adaptable enough to address these issues. Specifically, current app development practices do not seem to adequately consider seniors’ needs and possibly lack a process that includes asking appropriate questions, building relevant scenarios, or coming up with essential requirements. We observe that omitting questions and asking irrelevant or incorrect questions in the requirements elicitation phase needs to be avoided. We propose a Goals, Questions, Scenarios, Requirements (GQSR) Elicitation framework as well as an expanded questionnaire approach for requirements elicitation. We develop improved guidelines and rules for questions as part of the question/interview process. Through asking important questions and applying the GQSR framework, we developed the smartphone app, HOPE (Helping Our People Easily), with the intention of helping seniors in their daily lives and alleviating problems such as aphasia. The GQSR framework defines nonfunctional requirements (NFRs), FRs, questions, and scenarios producing questionnaires for the purposes of interviewing seniors. We achieve traceability between the GQSR Requirements Engineering framework and the HOPE smartphone app. HOPE, a real mobile app targeting seniors, is used to illustrate and evaluate our framework.