There are three partners in this Center for Pervasive Computing research project – Aahus University, IBM Denmark, and Aalborg Hospital. The overall objective is to investigate how to develop and use mobile technology together with the IBM Electronic Patient Record.

Objectives and Organization

The clinical objective is to investigate how we can support the mobility of clinical personnel and what the technological possibilities and limitations are. The commercial objective is to develop a ‘proof-of-concept’ for how to add mobile support to the IBM medical record and to investigate the feasibility of offering this mobility support to other IBM customers. The scientific objective of this project is to (i) study how clinicians use an electronic patient record on a day-to-day basis, (ii) to design, implement, and evaluate how a thin mobile client, with wireless access plays out in a hospital setting, and (iii) to design a novel contribution for user interfaces for small, handheld devices with limited screen size.

The project is organized with a steering committee representing all three partners and one common project manager.

The project is divided into 3 subprojects:

1. A study of the use of an electronic patient record at a department at Aalborg Hospital
2. Design, implementation, and evaluation of a thin client, wireless mobile access to the EPR. This is a proof-of-concept for a limited part of the functionality in the EPR.
3. Design and partly implementation of a novel user-interface technique for small, handheld devices with limited screen size.

Expected results
The expected results of the project are:

• An understanding of the consequences of implementing the EPR within a hospital. Aalborg Hospital has been using the IBM EPR for almost a year now, and this gives us a splendid opportunity to investigate what actually happens when clinicians goes from paper-based to electronic patient records. Such a study has not been conducted in Denmark before.
• A proof-of-concept for how to create thin client access for mobile devices to the IBM record. The challenge is to create a server-side architecture that automatically detects and adapt its output to the requesting clients screen and CPU capacities.
• An evaluation of the effect of implementing mobile support for clinicians as opposed to only having desktop PC as today.
• The design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel user-interface technique for small handheld devices.

Experiences will be communicated continuously in terms of workshops, prototype session, reports, and scientific papers.

The project runs for 1 year from 1st September 2001 to 1st September 2002.

Researchers from the area of CSCW, HCI, New ways of Working, and Object Technology are involved in the project. Furthermore, a master thesis student is associated with the project.