Early phase telemedicine requirements elicitation in collaboration with medical practitioners

Ubiquity of Information and Communication Technology enables innovative telemedicine treatment applications for disease management of ambulant patients. Development of new treatment applications must comply with medical protocols and ‘way of working’ to obtain safety and efficacy evidence before acceptance and use by medical practitioners. Usually, medical researchers design new treatment applications and engineers elicit application requirements in collaboration with these researchers to bridge the knowledge and ‘way of working’ gaps between them. This paper presents an elicitation method for new telemedicine applications in a collaborative setting of time-constraint medical practitioners and requirements engineers if the medical researcher is absent. Engineers compensate this lack of resources through cross-disciplinary studies and use of pathophysiological models in the absence of medical evidence. The paper discusses the application of a mixed elicitation method presented in earlier work in the addressed setting. The method applies a scenario based user needs analysis augmented by domain activity and user-system interaction analysis. The elicitation is conducted in a separation of concerns fashion combined with collaboration handshake protocols to align domain activities and user-system interactions. Later phase elicitation of user-system interaction requirements may apply known methods and is not addressed.