Toward a context awareness framework for healthcare applications

We are witnessing a significant expansion and penetration of wireless appliances, sensors, smart phones, and PDAs in a wide range of domains such as hospitals, healthcare, smart homes, and elderly home care. Healthcare applications are mission-critical, real-time, and are used in a complex socio-technical system that requires collaboration, communication and coordination between many actors (doctors, patients, nurses, lab technicians, administration, etc.) and devices in the system, depending on their context. This paper introduces a framework for supporting context awareness, which is built from available open source components. The paper illustrates how the framework can be used in the healthcare domain with the help of an emergency department application.