Hospitals of the Future – Ubiquitous Computing support for Medical Work in Hospitals

This paper describes the visions and on-going research within creating ubiquitous computing support for medical work in the hospitals of the future. Today, clinical computer systems seldom play any role in in the execution of clinical work as such. Electronic Patient Records (EPR) are more often located in offices at a hospital rather than at patients’ bedside, or in operating theaters. The are a number of challenges to the hardware and software design of contemporary computer systems that make them unsuitable for clinical work. It is, for example, difficult to operate a keyboard and a mouse while operating a patient. Research within UbiComp provides a range of new conceptual and technological possibilities, which enable us to move clinical computer support closer to the clinical work setting. An important branch of the research at the Danish Center for Pervasive Healthcare is to design and develop such new ubicomp computer technologies for clinical work.