Marcela D. Rodríguez

Context-aware mobile communication in hospitals

A, collaborative handheld system extends the instant messaging paradigm by adding context-awareness to support the intensive and distributed nature of information management within a hospital setting.

Location-aware access to hospital information and services

Hospital workers are highly mobile; they are constantly changing location to perform their daily work, which includes visiting patients, locating resources, such as medical records, or consulting with other specialists. The information required by these specialists is highly dependent on their location. Access to a patients laboratory results might be more relevant when the physician is near the patients bed and not elsewhere. We describe a location-aware medical information system that was developed to provide access to resources such as patients records or the location of a medical specialist, based on the users location. The system is based on a handheld computer which includes a trained backpropagation neural-network used to estimate the users location and a client to access information from the hospital information system that is relevant to the users current location.

Integrating context-aware public displays into a mobile hospital information system

Hospitals are convenient settings for deployment of ubiquitous computing technology. Not only are they technology-rich environments, but their workers experience a high level of mobility resulting in information infrastructures with artifacts distributed throughout the premises. Hospital information systems (HISs) that provide access to electronic patient records are a step in the direction of providing accurate and timely information to hospital staff in support of adequate decision-making. This has motivated the introduction of mobile computing technology in hospitals based on designs which respond to their particular conditions and demands. Among those conditions is the fact that worker mobility does not exclude the need for having shared information artifacts at particular locations. In this paper, we extend a handheld-based mobile HIS with ubiquitous computing technology and describe how public displays are integrated with handheld and the services offered by these devices. Public displays become aware of the presence of physicians and nurses in their vicinity and adapt to provide users with personalized, relevant information. An agent-based architecture allows the integration of proactive components that offer information relevant to the case at hand, either from medical guidelines or previous similar cases.

Privacy-Aware Autonomous Agents for Pervasive Healthcare

Hospitals are convenient settings for deploying pervasive computing technology, but they also raise important privacy concerns. Hospital work imposes significant demands on staff, including high availability, careful attention to patients, confidentiality, rapid response to emergencies, and constant coordination with colleagues. These demands shape the way hospital workers experience and understand privacy. In addition, healthcare professionals experience a high level of mobility because they must collaborate with colleagues and access information and artifacts distributed throughout the premises. Autonomous agents can help developers design privacy-aware systems that handle the threats raised by pervasive technology

Home-based communication system for older adults and their remote family

As in many Latin-American countries, in Mexico many older adults live alone as a result of the migration of one or more of their relatives, mostly to the USA. Thus, not only do they live alone, but they might seldom see these relatives for long periods, even though they often depend on them financially. With the goal of designing appropriate communication technology for seniors and their relatives experiencing this situation, we conducted interviews and evaluated scenarios and prototypes to reveal the practical ways they maintain emotional ties despite the distance. Based on those findings, we envisioned a communication system through which seniors and their relatives can maintain close social ties by sharing information, personal reminiscences and stories. We found that older adults perceived the system as a richer, natural form of communication with their relatives that could facilitate their integration into the networks that currently connect members of their families.

Supporting the strategies to improve elders' medication compliance by providing ambient aids

In this paper, we present Ambient Information Systems (AIS) that support strategies relevant to enable elders to effectively manage their medication, such as: remind (Remind-Me AIS), guide (GUIDE-Me AIS), and motivate (CARE-Me AIS) them to medicate. We have informed the AIS design through a case study we carried out to understand elders’ deficiencies for adhering to their medication routine. As a result of the case study and the AIS design process; we identified the design issues that should be addressed when developing AIS that cope with the elders needs for living independently. Identifying these design issues is a step toward proposing design guidelines for the development of AIS for elderly. Through a heuristic evaluation, we identified several usability problems that enabled us to improve AIS characteristics, such as the intuitive mapping of the information representations and the visibility of the different AIS states.

Supporting Context-Aware Collaboration in a Hospital: An Ethnographic Informed Design

This paper reports the development of a context-aware messaging system to support the intensive and distributed nature which characterizes information management and collaboration in a hospital setting. Our design was based on a set of findings gathered during a workplace study conducted in a hospital. We identified that collaboration in the hospital is highly based on a set of contextual elements: (1) the location of people and devices, (2) the timing of messages to be delivered, (3) the role-oriented nature of the work and (4) the artifact-mediate nature of information gathering. Those elements were validated and their support analyzed with hospital’s staff through a session where scenarios of use where created, refined, and evaluated. The results of this study allowed us to inform the design process of a context-aware architecture to support collaboration in a hospital setting. The architecture allows for the implementation of applications that respond in accordance to the context surrounding the activities performed at the hospital, thus enhancing information exchange, collaboration, and ultimately, decision making. In particular, we focus our attention on a context-aware messaging system developed on top of this architecture, and which allows health care workers to exchange messages that depend, for their delivery, on the status of people, resources and/or devices.

Supporting emotional ties among mexican elders and their families living abroad

The aging of the population is a phenomenon faced by most nations, such as Mexico, where 7.5% of the population is older than 60 years, a significant proportion of whom live alone (10%). This fact is related with the ever increasing migration of one or more of their relatives, mostly to the USA. Our work aims to provide a technological solution that eases the isolation of elder people living alone in Mexico while their families are abroad. To envision and inform our design we interviewed independent old persons living alone. We propose an electronic family newspaper, through which elders and their families share information, personal reminiscences and cultural stories, and occasionally interact with each other. Through its functionality, the electronic newspaper enables elders not only to maintain close social ties, but ameliorate cognitive decline.

Autonomous agents to support interoperability and physical integration in pervasive environments

Ubiquitous computing is the method of augmenting and improving work practices and knowledge sharing, by making computers of all scales, available but invisible throughout the physical environment, while amplifying human-to-human communication. Personal systems, such as PDAs and cell phones, give users access to computing resources regardless of their location. Handheld computers are being transformed from personal electronic agendas into mobile communication devices with intermittent network connectivity. Thus, they are becoming a natural medium to tap into an ubiquitous computing infrastructure. However, handhelds most often operate disconnected from the network thus reducing the opportunities for spontaneous interoperation with other peers or web services, which is a desirable feature of ubicomp environments. Autonomous agents can enable spontaneous collaboration by representing users, as well as devices or services available through the Web, which has become an ubiquitous medium for information sharing. An agent acts on behalf of the user while he is disconnected, and represents services added to the environment, thus allowing the physical integration and interoperability of these entities. We present the SALSA framework, which allows developers to implement simple agents for ubicomp systems. These agents use an expressive communication language based on XML, which provides protocols for locating and interacting with Web services even when the user is disconnected.

Intervention Tailoring in Augmented Cognition Systems for Elders With Dementia

We present an approach for personalizing nonpharmacological interventions for people with dementia (PwD) using ontologies. We conducted two case studies to derive an ontological model to personalize the planning and execution of interventions to address problematic behaviors. The paper describes how the ontology was derived, and illustrates how it is used to tailor an ambient-assisted intervention system (AAIS) at two stages: first, to decide on the services that the AAIS will offer the PwD, and then to adapt these services at runtime using contextual information. The results of a deployment of an AAIS during 2 months in the home of a PwD, indicate that the AAIS successfully addressed some of the problematic behaviors exhibited by the PwD, helping to reduce the burden of the caregiver.