User-centered development of a pervasive healthcare application

We describe the user-centered development process of MARiS, a PDA-based mobile frontend to a hospital information system. It allows mobile access to patient records, and the documentation of diagnoses and treatments as they happen. While similar applications have been studied in research contexts, we developed a system which was tested with a considerable user base and which is currently in productive use in several German hospitals. For the system to become successful, we embraced a user-centered design approach. In this paper we discuss, how the initial system design was derived from user requirements and studies of the application environment, and how continuous feedback from daily use continually caused the initial design to evolve and eventually stabilize to what now is a successful commercial product.