Augmenting informal collaboration in hospitals through pervasive computing

Informal communication is a necessary resource to accomplish activities in hospital work. It is used for collaboration and task coordination, as well as to gather knowledge and human resources necessary for patient care. Results of a field study that we conducted in a hospital show that most informal interactions happen face to face due to opportunistic encounters; a significant amount of these interactions involve the use of information artifacts - such electronic health record, lab results among others - on discussions about patient care. However, some of these interactions present some breakdowns. For this reason, we present the concept of on-the-move collaborative environment, a design concept that provides pervasive support for informal colocated collaboration through the interaction of a set of electronic services and heterogeneous devices. Finally, we present our realization of an OCE based system through the implementation of a prototype that provides four main services that allow users to access persons, artifacts and devices every time/every where.