The Aware-Hospital: An architecture for mediating social awareness amongst hospital clinicians

Health care systems will integrate new computing paradigms in the coming years. Context awareness computing is a research field which often refers to health care as an interesting and rich area of application. One of the areas for context aware computing is social awareness amongst a group of individuals. Providing individuals with social awareness about other coworkers is very important in order to keep a good communication and cooperation between members of a group. This can prove to be a difficult task when the workers that are mobile and are not located in the same place. Aware-Phone is a mobile application which is used to support context-mediated social awareness among hospital clinicians. Based on this conceptual and empirical basis, Aware is a general architecture for supporting context-mediated social awareness, built on the top of JCAF framework. However, Aware is a client-server based architecture and JCAF is implemented only on Java RMI. This paper introduces an extended version of JCAF to communicate over sockets and a more flexible mixed peer-to-peer design of the Aware architecture, namely the Aware-Hospital architecture. It also presents the design and implementation of the HospitalPhone, based on the Aware-Hospital architecture and the extended JCAF framework.