Risk Driven Requirements Specification (RiDeRS) of IT-based Homecare Systems

Use of IT in providing homecare services to elderly people is expected to reduce the workload of care-providers. It is also expected that this will increase the quality of services by providing services roundthe-clock and will support independent living of the elderly. However, ITbased care systems can also introduce new types of risks such as those related to availability and accountability. This can possibly lead to a decline of using such expensive IT-based homecare systems in practice. In order to prevent this, we propose a method to identify potential risks of using such a system, and to specify additional requirements of the system to mitigate or prevent these risks. We validate the usability and potential utility of our approach by three experiments using a case from the homecare domain. We discuss whether the proposed approach can be generalized for use in the wider class of adaptive critical systems.