Understanding the interaction support for mobile work in an emergency room

Abstract

Typically mobile and ubiquitous software applications provide services to mobile workers to help them increase their performance, effectiveness and eventually the satisfaction while doing their jobs. These services are directly related to the characterization of the activities to be supported. Based on such a characterization the designers of these solutions can envision the services that should be provided by the new system. Few guidelines are available to characterize mobile activities from an IT support point of view, therefore the designers have to guess the services to be embedded in these solutions. This paper provides a first step to address such a problem, identifying the context variables that characterize the mobile activities. Moreover, an ontology of activity characteristics and some design guidelines are provided to determine which supporting services can be used to address activities according to their characteristics. This proposal was conceived based on the empirical observation of the work performed by the medical personnel at an emergency room of a public hospital. Further analysis is required to generalize this proposal, in order to address mobile work in other scenarios. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.