Building a research prototype to provide pervasive services in hospitals

Research into the nature of pervasive computing has now been around for more than a decade. Nowadays pervasive applications exploit mobile wireless communication technologies to interconnect computing devices along with various sensing technologies, setting up a new kind of intelligent environment where applications can transparently search and use services without userspsila intervention. However, there are few examples of real world deployment of pervasive computing moving out from academic laboratories into our everyday life. We present BlueHospital - a research prototype that provides context-aware information and location based services to clinicians in hospitalspsila recovery wards. The experimental research prototype leverages Bluetooth technologies and Java services to offer patient information to clinical personnel based on the patientpsilas profile and the clinicianspsila preferences. We describe the overall architecture and discuss the implementation steps taken to create our location and context-awareness infrastructure. We run some experiments to evaluate the performance and system behaviour. Performance evaluation of BlueHospital was made with focus on energy consumption and service discovery time while offering the user a fast download of information.