Context in care--requirements for mobile context-aware patient charts

The hospital ward is a highly dynamic work environment, in which healthcare personnel rapidly switch from one task to another. The process is partly planned, and partly driven by events and interrupts. A mobile electronic patient chart (MEPC) will be an important tool for supporting order entry and accessing, communicating, and recording clinical information. The users need to switch from one context to another with minimal delay and effort. Context-awareness, the ability to sense relevant situational information, can allow the user interface of the MEPC to adapt to various situations. In this paper, we present a future scenario from the coronary care unit. This scenario is analyzed and discussed in order to develop requirements for design methods, context models, and system properties of the MEPC.