Supporting context-aware collaboration in a hospital: An ethnographic informed design

This paper reports the development of a context-aware messaging system to support the intensive and distributed nature which characterizes information management and collaboration in a hospital setting. Our design was based on a set of findings gathered during a workplace study conducted in a hospital. We identified that collaboration in the hospital is highly based on a set of contextual elements: (1) the location of people and devices, (2) the timing of messages to be delivered, (3) the role-oriented nature of the work and (4) the artifact-mediate nature of information gathering. Those elements were validated and their support analyzed with hospital's staff through a session where scenarios of use where created, refined, and evaluated. The results of this study allowed us to inform the design process of a context-aware architecture to support collaboration in a hospital setting. The architecture allows for the implementation of applications that respond in accordance to the context surrounding the activities performed at the hospital, thus enhancing information exchange, collaboration, and ultimately, decision making. In particular, we focus our attention on a context-aware messaging system developed on top of this architecture, and which allows health care workers to exchange messages that depend, for their delivery, on the status of people, resources and/or devices. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.