Background
There are three partners in this Center for Pervasive Computing research project – Aarhus University, Systematic Software Engineering, and Aarhus University Hospital. The overall objective is to investigate how to develop and use mobile technology to work together with the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) currently being implemented in the County of Aarhus (da: Århus Amt).

Objectives and Organization

The clinical objective is to investigate how we can support the mobility of clinical personnel and what the technological possibilities and limitations are. The commercial objective is to enhance the software engineering process at Systematic and to provide visions for and prototypes of mobile support for Systematic’s EPR. The scientific objective of this project is to study cooperative work in hospitals, and to design and implement a pervasive computing infrastructure, which can support distributed cooperation within hospitals.

The project is organized with a steering committee representing all three partners and one common project manager.

The project is divided into 2 subprojects:

1. A study of the development and implementation of ERP in Aarhus county
2. Four visions for mobile and pervasive EPR of the future

The second subproject work specifically with the following four clinical themes:

• Administration and documentation of the medicine given to a patient.
• Prescription of medicine.
• Clinical conferences about medicine.
• The mobile patient

Expected results
The expected results of the project are:

• An understanding of the consequences of implementing the EPR within a hospital.
• Visions for mobile and pervasive computer technology within healthcare and 8 tested and evaluated prototypes.
• A better understanding of the design process within software engineering and how to efficiently apply methods for user involvement in this process.
• Technological knowledge concerning mobile technology in terms of hardware, wireless network, operating systems, software architecture, etc.

Experiences will be communicated continuously in terms of workshops, seminars, prototype session, reports, and scientific papers.

The project runs for 2 years from June 2001 to February 2003 with most of its activity in the “middle” of the period.

Researchers from the area of CSCW, Mobility, New ways of Working, and Object Technology are involved in the project. Furthermore, several master thesis students are associated with the project.