Lynne Shapiro Brotman

MACCS: enabling communications for mobile workers within healthcare environments

As wireless communications systems become more ubiquitous, enterprise workers are becoming more and more mobile. Addressing mobility in the enterprise has recently become a pressing concern for many corporations. In particular, there is a growing component of mobile workers whose job tasks require them to be mobile within their local workspace. These workers sometimes do not have a desk or phone and frequently use their hands in performing required tasks; they typically referred to as corridor cruisers or campus roamers. One class of workers that fall under this category is healthcare professionals (e.g. nurses). Communication enabling these workers usually involves an expensive proposition: equipping them with a mobile/wireless phone, PDA or a paging device. Our goal was to see if we could address the communications needs of healthcare workers by using a small, inexpensive, wearable, hands-free audio device (a wireless headset) along with a speech interface to an intelligent agent. In this paper we present the results of an industrial user study in a real world healthcare environment of our Mobile Access to Converged Communications System (MACCS) which empowers mobile workers with a hands-free voice interface to manage their communications. In addition we also discuss the design, implementation and deployment of MACCS.

Interpersonal Privacy Management in Distributed Collaboration: Situational Characteristics and Interpretive Influences

To understand how collaborators reconcile the often conflicting needs of awareness and privacy, we studied a large software development project in a multinational corporation involving individuals at sites in the U.S. and India. We present a theoretical framework describing privacy management practices and their determinants that emerged from field visits, interviews, and questionnaire responses. The framework identifies five relevant situational characteristics: issue(s) under consideration, physical place(s) involved in interaction(s), temporal aspects, affordances and limitations presented by technology, and nature of relationships among parties. Each actor, in turn, interprets the situation based on several simultaneous influences: self, team, work site, organization, and cultural environment. This interpretation guides privacy management action(s). Past actions form a feedback loop refining and/or reinforcing the interpretive influences. The framework suggests that effective support for privacy management will require that designers follow a socio-technical approach incorporating a wider scope of situational and interpretive differences.