Understanding and Supporting Lightweight Communication in Hospital Work

Informal communication is an essential resource in hospital work; it is used as a means to collaborate and coordinate the way in which work is performed, as well as to locate and gather the artifacts and human resources required for patient care. The need of physical proximity to establish and hold...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on information technology in biomedicine Vol. 14; no. 1; pp. 140 - 146
Main Authors MejIa, D.A., Favela, J., Moran, A.L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States IEEE 01.01.2010
Subjects
Collaborative work
communication systems
Communications technology
Computer science
Cooperative Behavior
Hospital Communication Systems
Hospitals
Humans
Laboratories
Medical diagnostic imaging
Medical Informatics - instrumentation
Medical Informatics - methods
Medical services
Mobile communication
Observation
Operations Research
Pervasive computing
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Summary:Informal communication is an essential resource in hospital work; it is used as a means to collaborate and coordinate the way in which work is performed, as well as to locate and gather the artifacts and human resources required for patient care. The need of physical proximity to establish and hold informal communications has motivated the development of tools that support remote informal interaction. However, this kind of technology has not been widely adopted in hospitals, where workers experience intense mobility. In this paper, we present the results of an observational study in a hospital aimed at understanding how local mobility changes the rules in the provision of support for informal communication, and how technology could improve this form of communication. We found that local mobility fosters opportunities for colocated communication; however, it faces some inconveniences related to the affordances of the physical environment. We address these issues through the design of SOLAR, a collaborative application that supports colocated interactions in hospital work through the implementation and integration of five services that form a ubicomp infrastructure. Additionally, we present a discussion about the perception of users related to the usefulness of this tool.
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ISSN:1089-7771
1558-0032
DOI:10.1109/TITB.2009.2033384