Context Awareness - Application in Health Care

Application in Health Care

Context-aware mobile agents are a best suited host implementing any context-aware applications. Modern integrated voice and data communications equips the hospital staff with smart phones to communicate vocally with each other, but preferably to look up the next task to be executed and to capture the next report to be noted.

However, all attempts to support staff with such approaches are hampered till failure of acceptance with the need to look up upon a new event for patient identities, order lists and work schedules. Hence a well suited solution has to get rid of such manual interaction with a tiny screen and therefore serves the user with

• automated identifying actual patient and local environment upon approach,
• automated recording the events with coming to and leaving off the actual patient,
• automated presentation of the orders or service due on the current location and with
• supported documenting the required information keying in a minimum of data into prepared form entries.

Basically such contextually well formed approach requires scheduled workflows, as all necessary preparation must refer to given orders and set schedules. Working free hand or ex tempore does not provide such qualities.

Additionally, none of the RFID, WLAN or RTLS locating solutions advertising for most precise locating serve the required quality, as determining a location in conventional attitude looking for absolute coordinates fails either technically or economically.

However, the coincidence of personnel with patient is easily detected and delivers all options of reliable automating at reasonable effort. An escape is fairly available with the method of unilateration or fuzzy locating, where no absolute coordinates are required, but just the radial distance between personnel smart phone and patient wrist band. Such distance estimating is entirely sufficient to detect the context of servicing the patient, as no service is ever applied to patients only at larger distance. Even in nuclear medicine or with radiology diagnosis, the haptic contact of staff with patient comes before staff retreats while the patient gets exposed to isotopes or X-rays.