Beyond the hospital walls - Extramural mobile communication with CallMeSmart

Abstract

Physicians, nurses and other people who work at hospitals and in the healthcare sector often move around a lot. As they also frequently need to contact each other, mobile communication devices like pagers and wireless phones are important tools for letting them maintain contact. This can lead to problems as personnel are constantly interrupted during their work because coworkers don't know whether they are available to talk when contacting them. CallMeSmart is a context-aware communications system that aims to reduce the number of interruptions that hospital employees receive. By using information related to users' location, schedule and general availability, the system can inform callers that the callee is busy and that the caller should probably not attempt to contact them unless the situation is urgent. This thesis proposes an additional tool for allowing users of the CallMeSmart system to communicate by introducing GSM functionality to support the IP based calling infrastructure that currently exists. This opens up possibilities for users to communicate with each other even when outside the hospital.