Integration of Collaborative Features in Ubiquitous and Context-Aware Systems Using Distributed User Interfaces

Abstract

Collaboration is essential in healthcare environments for a wide variety of tasks and situations. Health practitioners have to perform complex tasks, which in turn are divided in more simple ones and workers can assist each other when doubts or unexpected situations occur. In the latter case, if the situation is an emergency, it needs to be solved first and then, pending tasks are again reorganized within their well-defined agenda. These changing conditions, which might result in an adaptation of the employees’ behavior, create the need of ubiquitous and context-aware software that offers information and functionality based on their needs. Additionally, many healthcare employees need to use the same application through different devices depending on their context, as they are constantly moving around the environment. The system should adapt its display window based on the device restrictions through a distributed user interface. In this paper, we present Ubi4health as a system whose main features include the aforementioned healthcare requirements. The system presents, as a differential factor in healthcare settings, the use of the distributed user interface paradigm within ubiquitous environments, which favours the collaborative work. Finally, we present the outcomes of the usability evaluation performed on the system based on the ISO 9126–4.